Adobe looks to be giving up on the enterprise

While much attention was given to Adobe's decision to can further development of mobile Flash, it appears to be quietly shuttering its foray into enterprise. Let's roll this one back a bit to understand what's going on.

Pundits on both sides of the 'should have/shouldn't have' divide make a case for mobile Flash. I was personally ambivalent except to the extent that Adobe had managed to create a reasonably effective de facto standard for running video on pretty much everything except iPhones.

Unless of course those were YouTube videos or were capable of being rendered with a fallback of some kind. That fallback is HTML5 for all practical purposes, despite the fact there are numerous questions about whether it is anywhere near secure enough, let alone capable of being pushed towards a generally accepted 'standard.' Put another way, most enterprise people I speak with talk quietly about using HTML 5 but it is always with something of a nervous tone. Was mobile Flash that much of a dead duck?

My colleague Jason Perlow argues in the context of advertising as a proxy for broader content that:

Most likely, we’ll see static JPG/PNG files used in Flash’s place, or HTML5 advertisement mini-videos and banners created using new tools like Adobe Edge are going to become more commonplace in order to fill the void.

I’m bringing this up because all of this represents a significant level of effort that any large content site is going to have to deal with, and if they are going to deal with it on mobile devices, which are becoming increasingly important in terms of overall traffic, they are going to want to kill two birds with one stone to include the desktop and other large format displays.

By virtue of having to completely re-approach how to deal with dynamic content on mobile, they are going to think of how to deal with all of their content.

Once that happens, Flash on the desktop browser is going to become endangered as well.

That would be a great pity but the signs are already there. At SAP TechEd Madrid, I saw one of the best implementations of a mobile application using...Flash.

It was created by the Adobe team as part of SAP Trainrace and was genuinely stunning in its visual appeal. Despite that, the question of mobile support came up and the Adobe team seemed confident in its future, only a few days before the axe fell. But it is what has been happening the last few days that suggests Perlow may well be right.

First up I received an email from an Adobe evangelist who told me: "I'm redundant." The person concerned is on maternity leave. You don't get to fire people in that situation. At least not in most European states.

It turns out Adobe has sent a letter 'warning' her of the fact she will be made redundant at the first opportunity. Needless to say, my correspondent is less than delighted, especially as being an Adobe evangelist means spending a good 60 percent of your time on the road. It's not a job for the faint hearted.

Then I saw a post by Duane 'Chaos' Nickull:

I am no longer with Adobe Systems as a Sr. Technical Evangelist. While on the 3rd day of my vacation in Mexico, I got the call with the explanation that Adobe is doing a major refocus and as part of that, many of us "enterprise" types are no longer required. "Überflussig" I guess is the correct German word for the situation.

I only met Duane the once at an SAP/Adobe technical event where he was teaching the use of Flash Islands in SAP landscapes. His delivery and teaching skills are among the best I have seen in the enterprise world. Nickull is capable of getting an audience fired up about using Adobe Forms and Flex like no other. That's a significant feat for anyone attempting to get battle hardened enterprise developers on side.

The deeper and perhaps less well known fact is that Adobe has been a long time partner of the SAP and regularly sponsors technical events. In that sense there is a cruel irony in the fact that the Adobe team did so well at SAP Trainrace and were sponsoring the event.

If as seems likely, Adobe is also abandoning the enterprise for Flash (why else would it let its enterprise evangelist rock stars go?) then a lot of developers will end up with orphaned development, perhaps in business critical situations.

Adobe is not being terribly forthcoming about this aspect of their most recent decisions. But then that's hardly surprising for a company that has appeared timid in the face of Apple's onslaught. Regardless, enterprise developers will now have some tough choices to make. There is perhaps a crumb of hope in the mobile announcement from Adobe where they said:

We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Other than that, clarity doesn't seem part of the current equation.