award tour

Techcrunch has really great interview with Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief software architect for the Apollo project. The apollo project is a cross-platform runtime which will use existing Adobe technologies like flash, flex, & pdf along with standards based html and ajax to create downloadable web apps. These apps could then be used even when a user is not connected to the internet. The interview lacked a lot of technical detail but still made the project sound quite interesting. There was a follow-up article on TechCrunch which shows some screenshots of demo app developed by Adobe.

If Adobe can provide a solution for installable rich-client apps which can be easily migrated from current web-based apps and have an easy-to-use data storage/sync solution, I think it would be quite compelling. The flash player currently has something like 98% penetration and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a sizable developer community. There could be a lot of potential for web-centric sites like flickr, youtube, last.fm, etc. Flickr could have a standard rich client for managing and uploading your locally stored photos whereas youtube could provide a simple video editor and encoder so that users can upload their movies already encoded as flash video. Another interesting item is that Adobe has open-sourced their ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Actionscript, which is used in Flash, is simply an implementation of ECMAScript which is standard used for Javascript. This is a great move for Adobe. Besides getting the benefit of open-source development on the VM, Adobe will be using the same VM in Flash and PDF that Mozilla will use it within Firefox for Javascript. This provides a really great story to developers of web-centric client apps and should definitely help the platform pick up mass and steam.

And who gets screwed if this takes off? Microsoft. Microsoft has a similar competing technology called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF. The only problem is that it only works on Windows. Interestingly, the interview briefly talks about WPF and Lynch points out that WPF will only be supported on Vista and XP SP2 so Apollo will actually be supporting more versions of Windows (98, XP) than Microsoft itself.

There really isn’t an industry as stupid or as greedy as the music business/cartel. The new york times recently reported that the Universal Music managed to extort $1 from the sale of every $250 Zune, Microsoft’s new mp3 player. Luckily for Microsoft, they make about $12 billion a year and have about $30 billion cash-in-hand. Clearly, this is a win for innovation when the only company that can afford to make a digitial music player is the richest company in the world. Maybe Exxon can enter the market too. Over at GigaOm, Om himself has a post entitled Microsoft, Zune & The Music Mafia in which he goes to town on the music cartel. The post is defintely worth reading but I find this is the most interesting take-away:

If Apple had to pay at least $1 per device for every iPod sold over past two fiscal years, its cost would be $62 million at minimum: or about one more song per device. If music industry cannot sell one additional song to consumers (and has to blackmail for more money) then, you as a business, have lost grip over your core competency.