Comments on: On brand consistency and BHAGs

By: John Coonen

John Coonen — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:05:08 +0000

What Would Lloyd Benson Say:

“Adobe? I knew Google. Google was a friend of mine. Adobe, you’re no Google.”

Agree, Adobe’s a great, empowering tool. Adobe’s here to help folks like Google and others create fundamental change.

By: Ankush Narula

Ankush Narula — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:30:42 +0000

a little devil’s advocate here… I wouldn’t entirely agree that Adobe hasn’t tackled any Inspiring BHAGs. Flash and AIR both pre-date their HTML/CSS/SVG counterparts. Flash certainly changed what was possible on a web page… And has driven creativity and innovation quite far. If nothing else, Adobe has driven the vision of rich asynchronous web applications and subsequently or indirectly spurred innovations in web browser standards. Let’s also not dismiss PDF and it’s impact on the move away from printing, faxing, and snail mail. I think it’s easy from a web infrastructure perspective todismiss presentation layer technologies an their impacts. I mean for deeper tier technologist that architect communications and security protocols, the presentation layer is just another client. Google Wave is communications infrastructure – outside the scope of Adobe’s core competency – the presentation layer. But to dismss Adobe’s successes in transforming the web’s presentation layer or how people work would be harsh. That said, I will concede that adobe’s successes were probably not based initially on BHAGs.

By: Pelle

Pelle — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:11:55 +0000

Just a little funny sidenote – Adobe actually did launch “Wave” around a month after Google did – it’s just that it’s a different Wave – but still, “Adobe Wave” exists: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/

By: Michael Kozakewich

Michael Kozakewich — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:46:19 +0000

There’s just something about Google. The way they can just lay out something new like that, over and over, in completely different parts of the internet ecosystem.

It’s amazing, really.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:00:36 +0000

Great article. You nailed it in terms of this not being Adobe’s DNA. And to me, Adobe *still* doesn’t fully get the web and what to do there (one of the main reasons I left). I think that is intertwined with that DNA, and with the tools and things they focus on. It is also to some degree not fair, given that they tend to build “tools”, not say “services”. Sure, they have a few services, but most people would be hard pressed to name even one I think. So it’s not really comparable to compare building something with AIR or Flash to an actual end user solution.

Ryan’s beef that all this could have been done 5 years ago with Flash and such is true, but at the same note, it didn’t get done. I would say that is partly Adobe’s fault in that they weren’t able to show what Flex, AIR, etc. could do in a convincing enough way to get the visionary folks to use it, but it’s also that there is a complicated overhead, not just with technology but with licensing, politics/corporate-ness, and all that that goes along with it.

Anyway, interesting stuff all around.