Robert Cringely has a post about Adobe and our strategy in which he describes Flash and PDF as “invisible”, the next step after ubiquity. He then goes on to talk about Silverlight, JavaFX, AIR and Adobe’s overall strategy. It was a fun thing to read and I think for the most part Robert captures one of the major reasons why I wanted to come work for Adobe:

So where is Adobe headed with this? Traditionally we’d expect a fight with Microsoft for the desktop, but I think Adobe is headed in a different direction, toward mobile and embedded devices, with the desktop variants like AIR primarily intended to make sure there is something for all those mobile devices to link TO.

I don’t discount the desktop quite as much as Robert does, but he pegs the value of our platform pretty well. One of the big things that we’re looking to enable is a consistent development story across a variety of mediums and devices. We want you to be able to build applications with web technologies anywhere your users can interact with your data. One of the reasons we chose WebKit for Adobe AIR is that it had already been ported to devices and we want to create a version of Adobe AIR for the mobile world.

There are definitely thing we need to work on; we need to get more developer to the platform, we need to get our mobile platform up to par with the rest of Flash and we need to make sure we continue integrating our products so designers and developers can easily work together. But all in all, I think we’re doing a good job and working to get better in all of those areas. Ubiquity is a valuable thing, but as Robert says, invisibility is even more powerful. We’ve got a great platform on our hands and I’m excited to be a part of that.

[tags]Adobe, Platform, Adobe AIR[/tags]