Byrne Tony Byrne

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Adobe's revolution is still mostly for designers

16-May-2006

Tags: Document Management (ECM), Building Business Case, Marketplace at Large

At the AIIM Expo opening keynote today, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen declared a "communications revolution," and then proceeded to demo 2 slick Flash apps -- for a mortgage application and self-service travel booking -- that could surely be done just as well in Ajax. Flash offers opportunities for working offline, but in both these cases, I'm not sure the typical customer would want to be disconnected very long from an interactive information source anyway. The question that kept going through my head was: if I wanted to modify either of those apps I'd need to ring up my designer as well as my developer. Theresa Regli was at my table and pointed out that at least Chizen's presentation was scenario-driven, and that's a good point: too many vendors launch into abstract business discussions without showing real value for the user. But I think it's revealing that Chizen showed 2 consumer e-commerce scenarios rather than any enterprise application. Every now and then someone wants to call Adobe an enterprise content management player. You have to give PDF its propers in the enterprise, but I believe the metastory of this keynote is that Adobe's attention still lies primarily with designers and e-commerce developers.

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