From Adobe to Apple With Love (Not Really)

The Boy's are at it feuding again today
Adobe launched an advertising campaign Thursday that takes an unexpected tack in its ongoing feud with Apple: proclaiming, in huge letters, Adobe’s love for the computer giant.

Make no mistake, though, it’s not a make-nice ad campaign by Adobe. In the ads, which are running in traditional newspapers and major news and technology sites online, Adobe also says it loves Flash — the Adobe software at the heart of the dispute with Apple. And Adobe makes it clear that it is unhappy with Apple’s decision to limit the software that can run on its iPhone system, which Adobe alludes to as “anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.”

The ads are accompanied by a site that touts choice and openness in technology and by an essay from Adobe’s founders, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock in which they say they “believe open markets are in the best interest of developers, content owners, and consumers.”

The ads themselves don’t make it immediately clear, though, what Adobe is hoping to get out of the campaign. At this point, it seems unlikely that Apple will change its policies unless it is forced to. The Journal has reported that the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are considering an investigation of Apple’s contract with developers, in which it prevents them from using the sort of software that would allow them to build their products in Flash and have that converted to run on the iPhone operating system. Apple’s argument is that such middleman software makes for a poorer experience for users.

In addition Microsoft has said that although it is supportive of Flash, there are problems with the software, which is currently responsible for running most video on the Web. As the Web transitions to a new coding standard called HTML5, there may eventually be less need for Flash to run videos.

But Adobe says the campaign is targeted not at Apple but at Adobe’s customers, employees and partners, including software developers, ad firms and media companies, which are heavy users of Adobe’s creative software.

“The intent of the campaign is to give us an opportunity to formally state our position,” said Ann Lewnes, Adobe’s senior vice president of global marketing, in an interview with Digits. Adobe employees have made statements about the issue, but the company has not put together a formal effort to counter claims begin made by Apple, and Ms. Lewnes said employees and customers have been asking for such an effort.

Adobe, she said, wants “people to really pause and think about whether they’re comfortable having one company control the overall Web.”

Whether Apple could control the overall Web is up for debate. The current argument involves its iPhone operating system, and the company has only about 25% of the overall market based on handset operating systems, according to comScore. Ms. Lewnes said Adobe is “confident in the competition” in the mobile area but wants to address Apple’s actions in part because Apple “has great products and they’re first into market.” Even if customers have increasing choices in smart phones “we still don’t believe that restrictions should be imposed on creativity,” she said.

She added that the campaign, which will be expanding, also calls attention to the benefits of Flash specifically. Adobe has a number of other programs available, but the ads are mentioning Flash specifically because so much attention has been focused on that software. Ms. Lewnes said more than 3.5 million developers are using Flash and that this number was up 59% in 2009.

On the Adobe site, a page is devoted to countering claims made about Flash itself. In particular, Adobe emphasizes that Flash “has full support for working on touch-based devices” and that, according to tech security firm Symantec, Flash “had the second fewest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed” in 2009.

UPDATE: Apple says it believes “in open Web standards too.” But “Flash is not an open Web standard like HTML,” said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris. “It is a proprietary Adobe product. Just ask the W3 consortium that controls Web standards. They have chosen HTML5 as the open web standard to move forward with.”

Source link=(http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/05/...ve-not-really/)