May 16th, 2007
Shantanu Narayen, Chief Operating Officer at Adobe on Apollo, Silverlight, and CS3
Knowledge@Wharton just published a great interview with Shantanu Narayen, the Chief Operating Officer at Adobe. In the interview he touches on almost all aspects of Adobe’s product line including Creative Suite 3, Flash, Flex, and Apollo. He also talks about some of the corporate culture at Adobe and how it differs from other companies. It’s a fantastic interview and there are some things there that I haven’t seen before.
One of my favorite quotes from Shantanu was when he talked about how open sourcing Flex is beneficial to Adobe shareholders. He describes how PDF continues to make money and I think this is a good indicator about how Adobe can continue to drive shareholder value while being more open:
Knowledge@Wharton: While this may be good for developers, how does it help Adobe’s shareholders?
Narayen: We will also continue to deliver products [with] Flash and Flex on the desktop [and with] server products. Take the analogy of Acrobat. PDF has always been an open specification, and we found a way to monetize it, both with Acrobat on the desktop as well as, increasingly, with LiveCycle on the server side for enterprises. Using Flex to deliver rich Internet applications enables [our customers] to do enterprise-wide data services, which will be an opportunity for us.
We also think that Apollo is an opportunity for us to build brand new applications. The Adobe Media Player, which was one of the other announcements we made, is a new desktop application built on top of Apollo. We will be able to monetize the Media Player by enabling companies that want to deliver content for commerce, through our server DRM [digital rights management] offering.
So we believe we have multiple monetization opportunities.
In the rest of the interview, Shantanu talks about Apollo and what differentiates it from Central. He notes that this is about all parts of the platform, HTML, PDF and Flash. Shantanu also says that Adobe is looking at DRM in Flash Video and also talks a bit about Microsoft’s Silverlight. All in all, this is one of the better interviews I’ve seen with Adobe and it comes out at a time when the RIA space is really blowing up.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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