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linux.conf.au Adobe: fresh AIR or stale air?
linux.conf.au Adobe: fresh AIR or stale air? | Adobe: fresh AIR or stale air? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 06 May 2008 | |
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The latest such case is that of Adobe; scared witless by Microsoft's creation of Silverlight to compete with Flash, Adobe recently lifted the licensing restriction on both the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications. The company's Open Screen project will also make "the next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free." There is no other company which Microsoft would like to crush more than Adobe. Novell was one company which had got the better of Microsoft in the 80s but is now more or less reduced to a vassal. The empire has struck back and done so tellingly. Adobe, which has always prided itself on its technology, is another company which snubbed Microsoft in the 1980s; as Bob Cringley tells us in his book Accidental Empires, when Bill Gates approached Adobe founder John Warnock in 1988 and asked for PostScript code and fonts which he intended to use with the next version of Windows, Warnock refused. Gates wasn't willing to pay for the technology, arguing that what he was asking for would help Adobe to broaden its business. Warnock wasn't convinced. This annoyed Gates to such an extent that he even formed an alliance with Apple, which owned shares in Adobe, to try and outdo Adobe at its own game; that failed too. |
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