Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market

ericatcw writes "Barnes & Noble, Sony and other e-book vendors may have the manufacturing muscle, but the brains directing the challenge against Amazon.com's Kindle eBook Reader is Adobe Systems. Like Microsoft, Adobe has built a formidable ecosystem of partners to whom it supplies software such as its encryption/DRM-creating Adobe Content Server. Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others. Amazon argues it just ain't so, and takes a jab, along with other critics, at Adobe's alleged open-ness."

How so ?

[Antiocheian]

The story title reads: "Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market" yet the only reference I found on Microsoft, on both linked articles, is this:

Though Adobe may balk at the comparison, its role in the e-book market is similar to Microsoft's in the PC market: a builder of a semi-open ecosystem of partners to whom it sells publishing tools.

So, what does Microsoft have to do with both articles really ?

Adobe vs Apple

[Yvan256]

Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others.

Oh yeah, because Adobe Flash sure plays nice on Mac OS X. /sarcasm

Re:Adobe

[amicusNYCL]

I agree. The first change they need to make is to allow Flash to work reliably over a LAN. For software whose purpose is to create internet content, it seems a little ridiculous that their official policy is to not support any type of LAN use in any context.

If anyone has Flash installed and wants to see what I'm talking about, open up Flash and use it to create or open a FLA file on a network share. With the file open, remove access to the network share. Now marvel as it's not possible to save the file anywhere, even on local storage. Even if the connection to the share gets re-established. This is how Flash has always worked, at least since I started using Flash 4, and that behavior remains in CS4 (Flash 10).

You're probably right about the codebase, but I would be equally surprised if they've owned the Flash property for this long without rewriting it, considering the glaring problems.

Re:Amazon sucks...

[CorporateSuit]

fired without cause as part of a witch hunt on a security breach.

Unfortunately, this sentence nullifies your credibility. This is what sociopaths say when they're fired for everything. This is what all my ex-con buddies say when they can't hold down a job for more than 6 months. It's what 16 year olds say when they get fired for doing 10 minutes of work in an hour, because they were too busy texting their friends about the movie on Friday. This is what unclever people say when they tried to pull something clever, got caught, and refused to believe that someone could see through the cleverness of their crappy plans.

I'm not saying that you fit into these categories, or that you did something wrong. Rather, I'm saying, you are simply using the same wording that they ALL use, which immediately triggers off "BULLSHIT" alarms in anyone over the age of 18 who doesn't use this line -- so don't bother with ever using it. Remove that line and your post carries much greater impact.

Re:Got to Side with Amazon on this one

[shutdown -p now]

So Amazon thinks through a problem and designs an elegant solution, takes care of the software, hardware, and marketing ...

... and vendor lock-in. Not really any different from Adobe's proprietary DRM.

That said, I would still pick Adobe in this fight, since their win means that I can buy a (DRM'd) ebook from any of a large list of online stores, use it on a large list of readers from different manufacturers, and switch from reader to reader and from store to store as I see fit. With Amazon, I'm locked into their store and their product line.

Re:Adobe makes MS look lean mean and nimble

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy couldn't be more right. There is no software company in the world that could be compared to the nightmare that is Autodesk.

AutoDesk are the only company I know that consistently ignores the pleas of its paying customers and actively taunts them.

Back when I used 3DS Max at work, there was a list of bugs and niggles longer than my arm. The next version came out, and as usual everyone was forced to upgrade for fear of being incompatible. Not a single bug that annoyed us had been fixed, the only fix we knew they made was something we'd never come across. The new version was worse than the previous for many reasons.

They ignore your feature requests and add features you'll never need. If you say you're switching to another product, they'll buy it and ruin it.

When they bought Maya, it was like the end of the world for 3D animators. The forums flamed like I've never seen them flame before. People who'd jumped the 3DS Max ship to Maya were inconsolable. A good percentage of Maya & Max users are now waiting for blender to build up enough missing features so they can at least switch at home.

Re: Wait

[TheRaven64]

My iLiad cost around £200 (I didn't pay full price). £2 per public domain book is what I pay for books (including ones in the public domain) from a local charity shop. The space issues are for papers, not for books: I have lots of book shelves, but my desk was piled high with research papers that I'd printed. Most of the materials I've read on it could have been read on other devices, but I've read vastly more on it than on my Nokia 770 and I can't read things in the park during the summer on any other device I own (which is when I got the most use from my iLiad so far). 'I wanted one' was the reason that I got it, but over its lifetime I've got reasonable value from it. One thing that I didn't mention was travelling. I can take a few dozen books to read on the train or plane or in hotels when I'm travelling. They would take up most of my hand luggage if I took paper copies (not to mention weighing vastly more).