I’m going to have more about this on Monday (it’s been a long week) but Larry Dignan and Jackson West have some info about the Q4 Earnings Call and the info is worth a read. Larry is a big finance guy, and I think his insight is spot on.

Obviously Creative Suite still rules the revenue roost at Adobe, but we’re hearing more and more about Flash and Apollo in these calls. That’s a good sign.

[tags]Adobe, Apollo, Flash[/tags]

If you haven’t seen yourminis you need to check it out. Actually, stop. Go to my ZDNet review, click the thumbs up button, then check it out.

Well someone created a way to track Apollo news by setting up an Apollo tab. You can sit in on a session, check out the sweet Apollo slideshow and keep track of Apollo blog posts.

[tags]Apollo, yourminis, Adobe[/tags]

You go meet the world’s richest man for a day and gigantic MXNA news hits: Mike Downey is leaving Flash to become the Senior Product Manager for Apollo. In the man’s own words:

I’m very excited to announce that I’ve accepted the position of Sr. Product Manager on the Apollo team at Adobe. It was a very difficult decision because I’m so attached to the Flash team (I bleed Flash red!), but in the end, it was simply an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. I really think Apollo has the potential to be one of the most important technologies in the history of the Web, just like Flash. I also think Apollo has the promise to take Adobe to the next level.

For those following along at home, the Apollo team is becoming the New York Yankees of Adobe (hopefully with better results). They’ve ended up with Chambers, now Downey and Ted has been doing some hybrid Flex-Apollo evangelism (though I’m not sure what his official job title is any more). If Matt, Ely and the other Mike end up jumping ship then we can just start handing out the championship rings now boys and girls.

There is going to be a ton of RIA knowledge on that team. 

[tags]Apollo, Mike Downey, Adobe, Flex[/tags]

Update: I’m sorry my disclosure statement is late. I tried to fix it yesterday but I couldn’t access this blog from work and then I had the Seahawks game last night. Microsoft did give me a free Zune and a USB key. Unlike others, they did not pay for my trip. I’m local to Seattle and as a result didn’t fly in and didn’t stay at the hotel room. Still very unprofessional on my part – I apologize. I’m running Windows Vista on my machines, so I haven’t even been able to get my Zune to work yet.

Today was just surreal from start to finish. Getting to meet Bill was definitely the highlight but the entire day was a great experience. I’m going to go into a bit more depth over on my ZDNet blog tomorrow, but there were a few things I thought were notable:

If you put 14 bloggers in a room, they will talk……..a lot. Usually it will be pretty insightful, but sometimes…not so much. All in all it was a fun group and I wish I would have gotten to know some of them more. A lot of them knew each other so it was a little tough to break into the inner circle.

Microsoft gets it. I had two favorite quotes from the day. The first was by Sanjay Parthasarathy, the corporate vice president in charge of evangelism when the subject of the designer/developer workflow came up towards the end of his meeting with us:

“I could talk about this stuff all day.”

The second was from Bill after Liz Gannes asked a great question about what applications he thought would be inside the browser and which would be outside:

“The distinction is silly from a technology standpoint….. And, you know, [inside the browser and outside the browser are] moving towards each other, but there’s still a bit of a barrier there, and new technology, things we’re working on, really will change that.” [Thanks to Liz for the quote]

We got to look at a lot of cool products today. I saw another tour of WPF/E (by the way, version 1 is going to support managed code cross platform in addition to Javascript – I hadn’t realized this but it’s big news for .NET developers), I got to see a demo of the XNA stuff (very kick ass) and also got to demo the Media Center (also very cool).

The weakness of Microsoft has become the fact that it is trying to do battle on 500 different fronts. However the strength of Microsoft is that it’s doing battle on 500 different fronts. The Microsoft platform is so encompassing that you can build rich experiences for so many different types of devices and people.

My final thought is about Mike Arrington. I didn’t say anything to him at the conference today. He looked like he was having a rough day and I didn’t want to be one of those people who approaches him out of the blue and tries to engage him in meaningful conversation – he just looks like he’s tired of the superficial networking shit. When he talked he was hilarious, and it may be tough to believe this, but he really doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously. I think it sucks because Mike is a guy who just loves blogging and talking about startups, and he’s good at it. Tech Crunch has become a big deal as a result, but it’s a shame that eventually the politics catches up with you and distracts you from doing what is fun. A-List seems to have its drawbacks.

All in all, a great day. If you’re interested in checking out more, here’s the list I’ve seen:

• Liz Gannes
• Steve Rubel

[tags]Microsoft, Blogging, MxnMash2006[/tags]

I just got home from an evening reception over in Bellevue for a Microsoft event I’ve been invited to tomorrow. They invited 14 people to come to Seattle and take part in talking about the next Mix conference. I was pleasantly surprised to be invited and one of the major draws was a Q&A session with Bill Gates for an hour today (it will be after midnight when I post this).

But after today, I’m really stoked for the event. Why? They invited some very interesting people to take part in this thing. Now I know people still think badly of Microsoft. It seems like people think of them as a character in a bad horror movie – the guy who seems nice but then turns out to be a killer at the end. That is no longer the case. Believe me, this is a new Microsoft. I know how crazy that sounds, but I promise you, we’re not dealing with the Microsoft of old here.

As I said, they invited a lot of interesting people. I got to talk with Liz Gannes, Shaun Inman and was briefly introduced to Jeremy Zawodny. Also in the group for tomorrow are Steve Rubel, Michael Arrington and Chris Pirillo among others. Consider me the ambassador for the Z-list.

It should be a really good time and I’m looking forward to some killer dialogue.

[tags]Bill Gates, Microsoft, Mix07[/tags]

I just caught via Read/Write Web that Google is doing some heavy Firefox promotion on their front page. Using Windows Vista with IE7 I can’t get the page to display, but Richard has a screenshot and others are reporting the same phenomenon.

Emre mentions that he thinks this validates some of the GoogleOS theories, but I don’t know if it goes quite that far. Obviously Google and Firefox want to see each other succeed and Google sees Firefox as a big counterweight to Microsoft in the ongoing browser wars, but does that make a GoogleOS more likely?

I’ve talked a bit before about Mozilla’s XUL architecture being an interesting platform for Rich Internet Application development. It’s largely cross platform, and while it doesn’t have the reach of Flash, there is a very active community that has been able to build some fantastic extensions to the Firefox browser. I actually like IE7 better as a browser but continue to use Firefox because of the extensions.

I think Firefox could provide Google some Apollo-like functionality and give them a way to tie their web applications more closely with the desktop. It also has the advantage of being open source and with Adobe’s contribution of the JIT compiler to the Mozilla foundation it means all of those Javascript-intensive applications will run super-fast in Firefox down the road.

[tags]Google, Firefox, XUL, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

As I always preface these things, the web is great and it’s enabled new lines of communication and opened up a monumental amount of information for everyone in the world. As it has evolved, we’ve gotten more ways to plug in. Our cell phones have access to it, PDAs use it, laptops and PCs connect to it and even MP3 players stream music from it. As a result, there has been a movement to make things more streamlined and much simpler so that the content can be accessed by anyone anywhere. For the most part, this is great. Web Services and Micrformats go along way towards making information consistent and consumable.

But other times this simplicity can be taken to an extreme. As good as web applications have become, they’re still accessed by a browser and they have to be simple enough to render correctly within those rules.

But why not break the web out of the browser and take advantage of the power of PCs? There are a few reasons. Programming for the desktop is hard, operating system marketshare is fragmented and installing software on the PC has become intrusive by the standards of the web. Apollo solves all of these problems.

The desktop wasn’t ever in danger of going away, but if you listen to the hype, web applications were taking over the world and desktops were nothing more than $2,000 – $3,000 dumb terminals. But Apollo (and Windows Presentation Foundation for Windows) is breathing new interest into the world of desktop development. You can use web technologies, use the same code for deploy your application on Mac and Windows, and take advantage of the benefits of the desktop like offline access and local file storage.

The web has revolutionized everything, and it’s going to do the same for desktop development. With how easy Apollo makes it to build a desktop application, we are going to see a great blend of web and desktop. With the expanded importance of multimedia on the web, a good next step is to create an immersive experience on the desktop that takes advantage of the web. That’s the kind of thing Apollo enables.

[tags]Adobe, Apollo, Flash, Flex, Web 2.0, Web Applications[/tags]

I noticed over on the Compete Blog that Adobe.com is a new entrant into the elite top 20 most visited web addresses in the world. I’m sure this is in no small part to the Macromedia aquisition, but it’s very cool to see.

[tags]Adobe,Traffic[/tags] 

According to TechCrunch and GigaOM Zillow (based here in Seattle) is rolling out a bunch of new features including a “Make Me Move” option in which house owners can list the price that they would sell their homes for right next to the Zestimate Zillow provides.

Zillow has been a long time Flash-embracee with their mapping technology. The application seems to use a combination of Javascript and Flash much like Google Finance. Zillow continues to generate buzz and the most recent move to work more closely with real estate agents and buyers is another example of Flash playing a big part of the user experience on the web. In this case a good user experience is part of the drive to help to sell a lot of expensive houses.

It’s been a hectic couple of days here and as a result I’ve been bad about responding to emails and light on blogging. The reason is that I’m in the process of starting a new job. So with the new picture on the right (I think the general consensus is that I look “older and balder”) I’m also starting a new career path which is going to bring me even closer to the Rich Internet Application world that I’ve come to enjoy so much.

I’m not quite as crazy as Ray and Joe to strike out on my own, but I am going to a web startup, Threecast, that is based out of Canada and has some great ideas about leveraging RIAs and helping people find and track the most fun parts of the web. As vague as that sounds, I’m still under NDA and we haven’t pulled the covers off the product yet.

First and foremost I’m excited to get to work with the team they’ve assembled. It’s a great group of people which is why I’m so sold on the company. A great product is one thing, but great people working together can overcome a lot of hurdles and adapt as needed. That’s the kind of team we have.

I’m also going to be working from home, and they’ve encouraged me to continue to add my voice to the RIA community. That’s going to mean I’ll be blogging more regularly (on both ZDNet and here on Digital Backcountry) and I’ll also be able to spend more time talking with all of the people doing cool things with RIAs on the web.

I’ll be catching up on email over the next couple of days, so if I haven’t gotten back to you yet, I apologize!

[tags]Ryan Stewart, Threecast, Personal, Blogging[/tags]