Big news for me today. I’m joining Adobe as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist on the Platform Team. One of the things I get a lot of feedback on is that everyone appreciates me being “neutral” and covering all angles of the rich internet application space. None of that is going to change. In fact, with Adobe, I’ll have even more access and also more resources so that I can do a better job of talking about how important rich internet applications are and how important these great experiences are.
One of the major reasons Adobe wanted to hire me was because I’ve been tracking the RIA world for a while and I’ve been talking to people building awesome applications. At Adobe, I’ll be talking to customers a lot, flying around the world presenting at conferences, and interfacing with developers to find out what they want. Adobe has a long history of being pretty open, but one of my goals at Adobe is to help in keeping them open and accessible – and honest. They want me to keep blogging about all aspects of RIAs and keep getting feedback about what works for people and what doesn’t. I’ll also be able to do a lot of interviews with people at Adobe in the hopes of showing off the cool stuff they’re working on and facilitating a conversation between the people at Adobe building products and the people that are using the products.
I also want to stress that part of the transparency will be following and digging into other technologies. You’re still going to see me talk about Silverlight and OpenLaszlo, especially on the ZDNet blog. I tend to be a very positive guy and I think any big moves in the rich internet application space benefit Adobe. As the space grows, Adobe will do well, so it will be fun to cover the ever expanding realm of RIAs
One thing that should be clear is that this wasn’t a case of Adobe going out and buying me or anything like that. As most of you knew, I’ve been doing Flex development as my day job and then going to conferences and blogging on my own time and money. It was kind of stressful for me to do two full time jobs, and my heart wasn’t in development full time. Adobe gave me an opportunity to do the things that I love; talking to developers and customers, traveling to conferences, and blogging.
Apollo (along with Flash Player and PDF Reader) falls under the Platform Team and Apollo is a technology that I really, really believe in. Getting a chance to talk to customers and developers about Apollo while the product is still growing was too good to pass up. I also get to work with a top notch team. Danny Dura and Kevin Hoyt are my fellow evangelists, two guys that know a lot about what developers are looking for and what Adobe’s strengths are. Mike Downey is my boss, and if you’ve ever met Mike you know how cool that is. I also get to work with Mike Chambers on a daily basis, so the team that I’ll be working with is absolutely awesome.
Everything kind of fell into place this week, and I’m really excited about the new role and getting to talk to more of you about how Adobe can keep moving forward. We’re at a fun time in technology because a lot of big minds are buying into the idea of rich internet applications and a lot of companies are jumping into the game. I want to know what you – the developers, designers, and business people – think is most important and how we can do better by you. Adobe has done a great job I think, and I’m looking forward to keeping them open and accessible. My contact information is on the contact page, so feel free to email me, IM me or twitter me any time.
[tags]Ryan Stewart, Adobe, Apollo, Platform Team[/tags]
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