Misc

Update: Here are Mike Chambers’ thoughts on the issue…

I thought it was a bad April fool’s joke at first, but it’s not April. It’s true, Adobe is laying off 8% of their global workforce, which is about 600 employees. More details will be available on Dec 16th during their regular earnings conference call. The full Adobe press release can be found here. Adobe’s president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, said this is primarily because of not so good CS4 sales.Further, he states, “The global economic crisis significantly impacted our revenue during the fourth quarter, we have taken action to reduce our operating costs and fine-tune the focus of our resources on key strategic priorities.”

According to his twit, the layoffs include Mike Downey, Sr. Product Manager @ Adobe and a very influential evangelist for the platform. I am very sad to hear this news and will definitely miss his contributions. Their have been rumors that Mike Chambers and Ryan Stewart were both getting cut as well, but luckily, this is false and false.

I have heard multiple people make comments like, ‘for the first time, I am losing faith in Adobe and their stability.’ We have seen many industries take a hit during this recession, it should not be surprising that Adobe is one of them. However, the internet is not going to suddenly vanish due to our economy. Until Silverlight becomes a real competitor, Flash has no threat of dissappearing any time soon. Neither is the marketing industry going away. As long as their is marketing and 2d graphic design, there will be Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe’s staff will shrink and it may yet shrink again after this round of layoffs is all said and done, but the company is not going away and their flagship products will not go away.

I am less concerned about the possibility that the next version of  Flash or Photoshop may take extra long to be released, and I’m more concerned about the jobs and families of the 600 that got laid off. Say a prayer that they are able to find another job, soon…

This is in response to Ryan Stewart‘s post: The Open Web Is Slow.

Thanks for the post Ryan. I agree with much of what you are saying and as a non-Adobe employee, I definitely agree that Adobe does better-than-most commercial companies at contributing and fostering the open source community. In-fact, the Flash community, by and large, is  a community that really believes in Open Source, whether it’s for silly experiments, or full blown engines like Tweener or pv3d.

However, I believe it would help the community if there was some sort of post explaining Adobe’s reasons for not open sourcing the Flash Player. I can speculate reasons, but it seems open sourcing it under the right licensing structure would be beneficial for everyone.

At the company I work for, we do a lot of development using Qt by Trolltech. They have a great licensing structure that states the following:

“The main licensing options available are:
* Commercial Licensing. This is the appropriate option if you are creating proprietary applications and you are not prepared to distribute and share the source code of your application.
* Open Source Licensing. This is the appropriate option if you want to share the source code of your application with everyone you distribute it to, and you also want to give them the right to share who uses it.”

Trolltech gets free contributions from the community to their source, and they foster a community that does free advertisement for the company (by the sheer nature of Open Source). Their commercial licensing is not cheap, so the company still makes great money. It’s a win/win for everyone.

Flash has such an extremely creative community that is always pushing Flash to its limits. I believe the tools that would be created if the Flash Player were open source would be incredible. At the same time, I love Adobe’s products and do not want the company to decline financially. But I believe the opposite would happen: even more people would desire to use Flash as the tools for developing it get better and better.