Much of the future success of Adobe Systems hinges on the work done by its Platform business unit headed by Kevin Lynch, the company's chief software architect.
But if the pressure's getting to him, it's not showing. Plus, he figures, Adobe's got the Web at large working for him.
Adobe makes the bulk of its money from packaged software in its Creative Suite, which includes Photoshop, Illustrator and other creative design tools.
As it looks ahead, Adobe is trying to diversify into online services for consumers and businesses. And it would like to keep its audience of Web developers and designers loyal and not lose them to Microsoft, which is increasingly competing with Adobe.
That's where Adobe's Platform group comes in. It designs the plumbing that will allow Adobe product groups to offer online services and other companies to write cutting-edge applications.
For Web developers, it has made more sophisticated tooling with Flex. More significant is the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), cross-platform software that enables Web applications to run on a desktop.
During the company's Max 2007 conference, Lynch, who came to Adobe through its acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, spoke to CNET News.com about Adobe's strategy and its big bet on the Web.
Q: The big announcement from the first day was that you bought the company that made Buzzword, a Web word processor. Why are you getting into that business that Microsoft Office is in?
Lynch: We thought that (Buzzword) was just a great example of potential of the runtimes that we are working on and also a great application in its own right. So it's not so much as getting into the Office market space as it's just seeing a great Web application that has a lot of potential and shows what the technology can do. And I think it's a good example of the direction that we think that application development is really having now.
But Buzzword is also part of your whole services push. Give us an idea of where you're going with services and how you intend to make money on them?
Lynch: Well, services is a new area for Adobe. We've been doing some services for a while like Connect, which enables you to collaborate online. What we're working on now, however, is a number of new services for designers and developers. So the Share beta is a way to store documents that you are working on with other people. And that's a gigabyte of space--it's a free service. We're also providing APIs (application programming interfaces) so you can build your own rich Internet applications around that service. We think that's going to be kind of a foundation service for us and a lot of other services and tools that work with that. Buzzword of course will be one of the first applications that will be hooking up to Share so you can work on documents on Share or you can work on them locally.
Also we're working on what we see is some enabling services for collaboration applications. So voice is a really important technology for communicating with somebody else live, so we are working on embedding voice capabilities into the clients of the Web so you can actually build a rich Internet application with extremely high-quality voice communications. And that's code-named Pacifica.
And the second one is one to enable rich collaborations. So screen sharing, white boarding, seeing someone else's video inside your application...The last one is in many ways the first one which is Scene7, the dynamic imaging service.
So these are all base-level services -- imaging, voice, collaboration, documents -- and that's because we are just getting started in this space. But it has a lot of potential for other services as well.
The other piece of news is the number of applications that are coming out on AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime. These are Web applications that run on the desktop. Does AIR make the operating system less important?
Lynch: I think what we are seeing is a big shift to the Web for application development and AIR is basically enabling a big trend for the Web to come full circle back to the desktop again. We're basically betting on this move to the Web. We're seeing all kinds of application development go that way already.
What we're now seeing is the desire for those applications to become more sophisticated, richer applications that do take advantage of local processing power, make use of local resources like your files, being able to notify you. These are the things we used to be able to do with desktop applications that you can't do right now with most applications on the Web. But we think that you should be able to make applications that have those capabilities and build them with Web technologies. There are hundreds of applications running on AIR (which is still in beta).
Will you use AIR in all your product lines?
Lynch: Just like the industry is moving to Web software, we're certainly looking at doing that too. We have some of the most sophisticated pieces of software around--things like Photoshop and server technologies and a lot of deep technology so it's not like there's going to be an overnight shift from the way we currently build software. But you'll start seeing new products built for the Web that draw from that heritage.
So for example with Premiere--it's a great video-editing tool built on the classic way of a software package that you get in a box. We are now hosting Premiere on the Web so you can go to YouTube and PhotoBucket...That's branded Premiere Express. The Premiere team is building it, they're using Web technologies (like scripting languages) to build it.
Same with Photoshop. Our CEO Bruce Chizen mentioned that we're working on Photoshop Express, very similar to Premiere. So you'll see a lot of that happening from us.
You'll see AIR, for example, start to be used in some of our software in different aspects. Maybe you like using Premiere Express--you don't need all of Premiere, yet you want to put it on your desktop. That could be a bridge...That's not something we're currently doing but you can imagine us doing it. There will be a spectrum.
What's the business model behind these hosted applications?
Lynch: Well, with Premiere Express, it's an ad-share model. The site that it's hosted on, it's advertising supported and we share in that revenue for people who are spending time using the Express editor. So ad-supported, subscription-based--all in new ways that people are monetising software.
How do developers make use of these Web services?
Lynch: We're going to make a bunch of APIs to these services available to integrate things like voice into your application. With Share, for example, there is a document repository, file repository that we're hosting. Everybody's got a free gigabyte of space and there are some Web APIs that anyone can use to access to make use of that data store. So you can build a file browsing user interface or you can build your own image editor and use Share to hold the documents behind it. Developers can do whatever they like to make use of that--there's just APIs available.
On the business side of that, there is an amount of free storage and beyond that we will provide premium services that could have revenue associated with them either through ads or subscriptions and models like that.
