About 5 seconds after I finished writing the post below, I got word in my inbox that the posters are going to be free. Adobe, my hat is off to you. I think it’s a great move, I think people are going to love the posters, and I think they’ll be a huge hit.

I know Adobe places a huge value on the community that they’ve developed, and they care about what we think. They are passionate about both their products and the people using them. I think this is a great example of how they value and internalize what the community thinks. Bravo Adobe.

—Original Post—

I got a ton of follow-up to my post about Adobe charging for the posters. There were a lot of comments, I got a lot of email about it, and it clearly touched a nerve. Because of that, I wanted to post something now that I have a lot more information.

Do I think charging for posters is crazy? Yes, and a lot of people think the same thing. Do I think Adobe wanted to charge for the posters? Absolutely not. I KNOW Adobe isn’t trying to run things on the cheap or make money off of these posters. So there had to be other issues here, and I got a taste of that.

These posters are gigantic. (Check out the photo evidence) When Ted says he can’t wait to decorate his cube with them, he’s kidding. I’ve seen his cube and they are not going to fit. These aren’t cube decorations so much as they are home office wallpaper. So the logistics behind printing these and shipping them to Vegas are mind blowing.

Secondly, there is a big difference between MAX and Flex Marketing. Clearly there is going to be some big demand for these posters, and making one for every person at MAX would have been crazy (see above). But you have to have them at MAX, so they’re going to be available. However the Flex Marketing team wants to make them available to as many people as possible, so stay tuned.

Third, there should be some value associated with these – they were a monumental undertaking. Some people in my comments suggested that charging just a little bit for them would be good, and I agree with that. You want to make sure people are going to take care of them and actually want them. Putting a small price tag on that makes sense. Dropping $30 bucks for a set of posters after paying for MAX is one thing, but $5 or $10 bucks for the entire set seems a lot more reasonable.

Adobe is great about listening to their customers, and they encourage feedback in all forms (even ranting blog posts). Am I going to buy the posters? Of course I am, they look awesome. Was it a bad move to charge for them? Yes. But I realize this isn’t about Adobe being cheap – there are a lot of other factors that go into a decision like this. I think in the next few weeks, you’ll see exactly how much Adobe is willing to do for its developers. Ones that can go to MAX and ones that can’t.

Hot on the heels of a fantastic post about how Adobe is marketing Flex and asking for community feedback, I catch this post over on Ted Patrick’s blog:

There are 3 API posters available at MAX and I just posted the PDF versions of these posters to Flex.org! The posters provide a visual map of the class inheritance in Flex and AS3, exposing all methods, properties, and events. I cannot wait to wallpaper my cube in these posters.

Great! I love the posters from Adobe. I have a couple of ColdFusion function posters (MX and 7) and I find them to be a great resource. I was hoping we’d see some for Flex 2 and ActionScript 3 at MAX. Then I get to this little gem in the comments:

The PDF’s are free, printed versions are AS3=$10, Flex=$10 ,and they come with a travel tube.

What on earth is the marketing team thinking? Let me get this straight. People drop $1,000 dollars to go to MAX, not including the $200+ a night at the Venetian and airfare – so we’re talking about a significant chunk of change. Then, they get to the conference, and they’re going to be charged $10 bucks each for posters that have traditionally been free? Really? These people drop a ton of money because they’re excited about your conference and then you nickel and dime them on the posters? Does this seem reasonable?

Ted says the cost of the posters are getting them printed at big sizes. I don’t buy it. This should have been written off as a conference expense and used to generate more buzz about Flex and ActionScript among the Adobe community. I wonder how much it costs to print the big MAX signs that we see up all over the place.

Just a terrible move at a time when it seemed like Flex marketing was ready to break out.

I’m going to jump on the Graeme Harker bandwagon and encourage you to go check out his post on Flex Marketing to developers. He’s got a lot of good takes on things and I really liked what he says about .NET and Java developers. But he really covers the entire gambit and it sounds like he and I share a lot of the same views. He’s spot on about leveraging partnerships with other industry big shots, and building out a good developer network.

Sadly, I wasn’t subscribing to Graeme’s blog before this, but I am now, and I think it’s one you should put on your watch list.

Update: Another thing I really liked was from the comments in Graeme’s blog. AQ mentioned Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Labs. According to AQ, the lab consists of “an elite group of architects that puts out free guidance packages such as Enterprise Library. These frameworks, which are released under a permissive shared source license, are incredibly useful in training developers how to leverage the complex .NET APIs in building enterprise applications.”

It sounds like a combination of the Adobe ACE program, the XD team and the Consulting group. I think something like this, with engineers hired by Adobe, would be very cool.

I didn’t see this on the aggregators, but since there was talk today of the marketing direction of Flex, I thought this was pretty important. Adobe has appointed Ann Lewnes as Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communications.

Ann was previously at Intel where she had responsibility for the “Intel Inside” push and from what little I’ve read about her today, I think she’ll be a good person to take over for Melissa as Adobe evolves. There is some info on her over at her ZoomInfo page (look yourself up on that thing, it’s scary). She has a ton of experience, so it will be interesting how she makes the transition into marketing for Adobe.

Update: Whoops, forgot the link to Marketwatch. Fixed now.

Great article over on AdAge about Nike’s web marketing. From the article:

Go to Nike.com and you’ll find a blazing-fast video tutorial in a visual language anyone can understand. Choose “Running” and you’re not only presented with shorts and sneakers, but running sunglasses and Apple’s iPod Nano. By exclusively using Adobe’s Flash platform, Nike also recently revamped its e-commerce site, NikeStore.com, to make it faster and easier to navigate.

The article isn’t exclusively about Flash, in fact it talks a lot about the Nike-Apple partnership, but it does paint a picture of a very forward-thinking company. The Flash Platform is a big part of that, and I hope we’ll see more companies improve their brand and the experience with Flash.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post disparaging Adobe’s advertising for Flex 2 on TechCrunch. As someone who has invested a lot of time learning Flex, I very much want to see the product succeed. The more demand there is for Flex, the more people read my blog and the more my skills are in demand. So when I saw the advertising, I wrote that I hated it. Adobe could have ignored the random blogger trashing their advertising, but much to my surprise, Jeff Whatcott posted a comment and asked for feedback. A few people responded to Jeff, some went as far as creating their own banner ads for the product. It was very cool to see the community get that involved.

Fast forward to today and Matt Chotin is calling on developers once again to get involved in marketing Flex. It is both rare and refreshing to see a company of Adobe’s size make their marketing efforts so transparent. Matt’s post outlines exactly how they are going about marketing the product, what they think are important ways to spread the word and the many initiatives they have to grow the developer base. It’s like a Wharton School case study in marketing technology .

So now that they’ve given us the transparency we were clamoring for, we need to return the favor and continue pumping them with constructive ideas. There are some good starts in the comments of Matt’s post, but I know a lot of smart creative Flex people that I haven’t heard from. I’m going to start calling you out.

So what do I think is important? I loved the quote by Yakov Fain, “I still have a feeling of a small town community where people keep telling to each other that their town is the best.” Yakov is right on target here, and I think this is just the way the Macromedia community works. We really enjoy telling each other how great the products are. Adobe does very well with designers, but more outreach needs to be done for developers.

First off, do a revamp of Flex.org. Make it a real developer community just like MSDN or the Sun Developer Network. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and both Microsoft and Sun are worth imitating when it comes to developer relations. Invest in flex.org, talk to developers about what they want to see there and build it out. I’d even like to see something like developers.adobe.com - help people’s perception of Adobe include developers as well as designers.

Also, continue thinking outside the box. MAXUP is a great example of this - something Adobe wouldn’t have done before, but that will be very beneficial to developers. Hold another MAXUP in San Francisco, entice small development shops to come and see what Adobe developers are all about. Holding MAXUP in San Francisco makes it easy for the tech influentials to come and see what’s up. Invite bloggers, engage rock star Ajax developers to see what suggestions they have. Talk to the Linux community, show them tools available to build RIAs for Linux. Expand the discussion to non-traditional customers.

From what I hear, Flex is seeing a lot of adoption by big companies, and that’s great. At the end of the day, Adobe is going to make most of its revenue from big companies using Flex and Flex Data Services. But to take the product to the next level you have to get the little guys involved. You do that with things like MAXUP, and you do that with things like the Flex stickers. Pique the interest of geeks everywhere, make Flex a more visible, underground presence. Easier said than done, I know, but well worth the effort.

There is an interview in the New York Times with Steve Ballmer about Windows Vista and whether or not Windows is near the end of its run. When you look back at the time between Windows XP and Windows Vista, it is astounding the number of advancements and cultural shifts the web has helped usher in. A lot of that has to do with Google and the initiatives it has pioneered. Just look at their recent release of Google Docs to see how far the web and software have come. But in the end, Google really just filled a void of innovation. Because of the mammoth undertaking that Vista is, Microsoft was unable to show any real innovation between Windows XP and now. The entire company was focused on the next generation of operating system and as the ship dates continued to slip, it seemed that people in Redmond moved further and further into their shells unaware that the world around them was changing.

But it did, and the technology world will never be the same again. The operating system is becoming a commodity. It doesn’t matter what OS you’re using, as long as you can connect to the web. That’s a scary thing for a company that has made a living off of the OS. And people are responding to the change. People are buying Mac Book Pros with the knowledge that they can dual boot into Windows when needed and do a lot of their work via web applications. More people are starting to look into Linux as an interesting second option. As people continue to move to web applications, and it won’t be overnight, there will be a desire for a rich experience. One of the redeeming factors of Vista is that its user interface is great. People like things to look shiny and pretty, and applications are no difference. The key behind RIAs is providing that richness in a web application that people can use wherever they go. Or in the case of Apollo, take it with them when needed.

I’m a loser, and I’m doing this blog a disservice. Things on the career side have been very, very busy and keeping two blogs updated has taken a bit of a toll. As a result, the blog posts here have lost out. But frankly, that’s a shame. One of the things I liked doing here was talking about all of the cool stuff I saw going on with Flash. Interviewing small companies using Flash, digging into the guts of what random people were making it do.

The reason this kills me is because there is a TON of awesome stuff going on with Flash. Every day I see something awesome, and I just don’t have time to post on it and get more info – it really sucks. I try to hit the big points over on ZDNet, but I don’t get to highlight some of the cool, ground roots stuff and I don’t get to follow the community as closely.

Today, the thing I saw was HD Flash video. HD has been done before, and this isn’t anything particularly new, but Fabio’s optimization, running in full screen, really got my attention. And hey, they’re might be some money in this online video thing .

So if you have something cool, let me know, I always love seeing what’s up, and sadly, it’s easier to track the scene from my inbox.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote up a review of Smalltown over on TechCrunch. Smalltown is a site for local reviews, and the content so far seems to be good. It’s definitely banking on being a community driven site, but I think something like this is good as it brings Web 2.0 to a more broad audience in a useful way. I may not care what Web 2.0 is, but if I can look at reviews for hardware stores in my area, that’s valuable.

But one interesting thing about Smalltown is that it uses Flash. This ends up being a big part of Marshall’s review, and I think it’s a great example of when not to use Flash. Frankly, this could have been done just fine in Ajax, without the strange feel to it. The idea is great, the content seems good, but the execution leaves a bad taste in my mouth, and I think it gives Flash a bad name.

I have talked a lot about web sites versus web applications over on ZDNet, and I need to explore that more. To me, Smalltown is a website, and the use of Flash is overkill and results in a detrimental user experience. Flash is a powerful tool, but the problem is misusing it. You can’t give people more reason to dislike it – they have enough.

[tags]Smalltown, Flash, TechCrunch[/tags]

Wow, I’m speechless. Google actually bought YouTube. I know the web had been abuzz about the possibility, and that YouTube signed a series of deals today with various content providers, but I still had trouble wrapping my head around it. $1.65 billion is a huge, huge price tag, even with Google’s ever upwards stock. Now this aquisition was about the eyeballs, and I realize that, but this is still a $1.65 billion investment in Flash technology.

It will be very interesting to see how they go about making money off of YouTube and Flash Video. Wow.

Update: Here’s the press release from Google.

[tags]Google, Flash Video, Flash Platform, YouTube[/tags]