I don’t usually repost, but I posted an article with the same title over on ZDNet at 11:30 Friday night, so just wanted to hit the aggregators again as everyone comes into work today. The post follows up some of what I mentioned in my post about The Most Important Person at Adobe and some of my commenters on ZDNet brought up the issue of a 64 bit player.

I really like the fact that Adobe has the Penguin.swf blog which tracks Linux Flash Player development. I think that level of transparency is awesome. It’s clear from the amount of comments that there is a lot of energy in the Linux community. I think Adobe could make a big splash with Linux, and not by open sourcing the player, but by talking to the community and working with them. I don’t use Linux, but the people who do are smart, geeky, and good evangelists. Adobe could use that.

There are a lot of people to choose from, whether you’re a Kevin Lynch fan, or you like how David Mendels is constantly tracking the scene. Maybe you’re a big boss fan and you like Bruce Chizen. Or you could even like guys like Mike Chambers, John Dowdell or Matt Chotin, three examples of people who are really involved in talking to developers and making products better. Another choice might be the Ben Fortas and Ted Patricks of the world, evangelizing the products we all know and love. But you’d be wrong, the most important person at Adobe is
Mike Melanson, a Flash Player Engineer working on the Linux version of Flash Player 9.

I’m planning on writing a couple of posts over on ZDNet about this, but as I see it there are two sides to cross-platform, the economics of a cross platform solution, and the potential impact. In many ways, they go hand in hand, and the importance varies depending on whether or not you are looking at the short term or long term value. Mike, and the rest of the team working on the Linux version of the Flash Player are the people that Adobe will depend on to truly be as disruptive it can be.

You may not agree that Adobe should be disruptive, or you may think they won’t be – those things are up for debate, but what is crystal clear to me, is that Linux is the key. I’ll try to quantify that more on ZDNet later this weekend. Mike, if you read this, drop me an email. For that matter, anyone from the Linux Flash Player team should drop me an email.

Knowledge@Wharton, the newsletter of the Wharton School has two great articles that are worth reading for anyone interested in the future of software. The first is a good summary of a panel at Supernova which discussed specifically how desktop software will look in the future. The panel got into some of the most important issues that need to be worked out, privacy being first and foremost. It’s an excellent summary and rounds out the issues nicely.

The second is more fun because it is an interview with Kevin Lynch (where’s the podcast?!). It is always interesting to hear Kevin’s take on things as he’s ‘behind the lines’ and one of the major factors directing the vision at Adobe. In the interview he talks about Microsoft, WPF, Apollo, and where Adobe is headed with the Engagement Platform.