Before I go into it though, I want to talk a little about where Adobe’s been going strategically over the past few months. Chances are, you know of Adobe as a software company with a large portfolio of products targeted squarely at the creative professional (PDF, Flash, Photoshop, etc). Yet if you’ve been paying very close attention recently, you’ve noticed a whole slew of efforts intended to broaden their portfolio into the land of software services. Pacifica, Photoshop Express, Acrobat.com, and Kuler are only a few, and many of them go so far as to completely obliterate the web/desktop barrier itself.

The web has, if anything, become an even noisier place recently as startups and established services compete for your attention. These services and companies are so specialized that they only provide a very focused piece of functionality, and though they are usually good at what they do it’s difficult for individuals to leverage one service against others. In most cases they rely on the community or some enterprising company to bridge the gap between the forest of published API’s. Assuming this actually works, the short term result of this will be a web of services much like a distributed manufacturing network, where core resources (microblogging, address books, email, search) are packaged into products (facebook, gyminee, etc) targeted at specific use cases. In the long term, we’ll likely see horizontal and vertical consolidation, but that won’t happen for a few years yet. For now we are left with a mess of mashups which try to bring something new to the table by carving out a new, interesting use of cross-referenced information.

The catch is that many of these packaged platforms are specific to a demographic rather than to an individual or activity, and so the lesson from the Long Tail has yet to be applied- no platform is flexible enough to allow a user to fully customize their own environment. Let’s propose an example: You are an independent marketer, and in your day to day activity need to create, manage and analyze a variety of internet polls. Initially this seems fairly simple, right? SurveyMonkey lets you do most of this, but can you, from their website, also handle the email blasts that drive traffic to your poll? What about a Twitter announcement? And come to think of it, exactly how detailed can you get with your data, given that cross-referencing with other sources requires complex Excel acrobatics?

What’s missing is the “meta” platform, the application where your services are not preset for you- they’re set by you. To some extent, Facebook tries to do this through its third party API, yet individual applications still cannot coexist, nor can they communicate with each other. A Meta platform would, from a functional standpoint, be much more like an iGoogle, with the notable difference that individual ‘widgets’ are not prevented from talking with each other (integration, after all, being key). It’s the ultimate user-created mashup, where each individual can decide which services or sources are used in tandem.

Enter Adobe Genesis. As mentioned before, the concept is still in very early development, but what I’ve seen demoed took me through my initial skepticism and brought me to a reserved level of excitement. There are still a lot of questions that needs to be answered, but the concept is not only interesting: It’s disruptive, and overdue.

In short: The Genesis team believes that given a blank workspace and a series of catalogues filled with widgets, a user will custom create not only their own application, but in doing so will merge the complex and disrupted cross-site and cross-application workflows into one single, simple screen. In a Digsby-like statement of integration into a common platform, they aim to eliminate the multi-application paradigm in the context of the business user. I know the pictures below (taken from their flickr stream) are poor representatives of an actual demo ( Are you going to MAX? You should ), but if the concept of “Build Your Own Application From Widgets Of Applications You Commonly Use” doesn’t have you excited, go take a look at the presentation from the Office 2.0 Conference (It’s the second video).

Workspace management, allowing a user to add and remove widgets from a given workspace. In this case, announcing a widget that describes user’s 401k benefits.

Example Workspace, including Google News, SalesForce.com and Pipeline Analysis.

My biggest problem with the idea is that it’s being pitched as an Enterprise solution. This means that we’re assuming that large companies out there see enough value in this application that they’ll be willing to commit their own resources towards building an internal collection of widgets (To integrate with their own ERP or Inventory system for instance). As with any kind of software development effort, this will inevitably require usability and use case analysis, and if you’re going to go to that kind of effort the step to building a full-blown application may very well be more cost effective in the long run (I can hear the Microsoft Sales Guy now). I’m not saying that companies won’t put resources towards this, but I feel it’s far more likely that the ERP solution providers (Oracle, etc) will be providing these widgets.

I feel the real case for this platform is in the SMB space. Companies that don’t have their own development houses, that’ll be using the Genesis Desktop to integrate a variety of services provided by common web services they already use. Consider the Social Media Strategist, who would create a desktop with Twitter, Summize, Google Blog Alerts and their RSS reader of choice. How about the Independent marketer, who’d be merging SurveyMonkey, Constant Contact, PointRoll, WebTrends and event-management-package-of-choice? Or, to hit a little closer to home, how about the Software Developer who’d join Cruise/Hudson, Jira, Basecamp, SVN and IRC? The Fitness nut that joins Google Maps, Garmin Connect and a virtual trainer? The use cases are there, largely because they’re self-defining. Anyone’s a use case, if their widgets are available.

First of all, I was pretty intimidated walking in. There are people here who don’t just play around with technology, they rip it apart and dissect it with a scalpel. Overhearing conversations about audio sampling latency and the specifics of video codecs make this little developer here feel like more of a script kiddie. Even so, it’s been an amazing experience, because while many people here have played with AIR, I seem to be one of the few ones who’s actually constructed a full application with it. Bringing my performance concerns directly to Mike Chambers was also kindof awesome. All in all there are a lot of really big brains here, and picking them has been a blast.

Secondly I want to talk about the Manager’s summit, where we as managers got together to share ideas and figure out what we’re doing right and/or wrong. The biggest revelation was that we’re all dealing with the same problems: Finding speakers, motivating volunteers, driving attendance and so forth, and some of the solutions we’ve come up with have been absolutely ingenious.

First, I present a few ideas provided by other managers (attributed as bets I remember):

• NYC: Don’t do a presentation style meeting, do a roundtable style meeting.
• Bob: Write a Cron job for your email reminders.
• Bob: Go for Intermediate to Advanced topics: Challenge the newcomers, don’t bore the experts.
• Small crowds are just as important as big crowds.
• Educate, Entertain, Employ.

Now, some potential topics:

• My Biggest Mistake
• Social Networking Tools
• The Freelancer Toolkit
• What interesting things have you done?
• Mapping in Flex
• How to be a Passive Job Seeker

And lastly, 12 golden rules for Group Longevity, presented by Michael (forgot his last name) from Chicago.

1. In two months an opportunity might come up, so don’t become too rigid in your planning.
2. Treat the group as a democracy of one. One man, one vote. You’re the man, and you have the vote. Going to committees adds unnecessary overhead and makes you dependent on others.
3. Give it a try, no matter how crazy the idea is. There’s always another month.
4. If it interests you, chances are it’ll interest someone else.
5. Sell it big! Make it sound like something they can’t miss!
6. Big Name Speakers do not make a great meeting. Have the community drive the events.
7. The best meetings are ones where everyone gets to participate.
8. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Ask the stupid questions, so others know it’s ok to ask them.
9. Have newbies be presenters. Let the experts learn from them rather than the other way around. It’s better to learn what struggles they’ve had at the beginning, and what skills are developing in other areas when you’ve become very specialized.
10. Avoid being the presenter as much as possible. You’re the facilitator, not the presenter.
11. Focus on what makes sense to your group.
12. Expect Nothing, Appreciate Everything.

What it really means is the following:

Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications

This was more of a licensing restriction if I’m not mistaken, meaning any device manufacturer can now make use of these formats. In practice you might see native (or embedded) implementations of .swf or .flv, including, say, your Tivo, Streaming Video on your XBox, PSP, Nokia, etc etc etc.

Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player

Flash Player has been annoying to push to other devices, largely because of the ridiculous number of handhelds that are out there. Getting it working for so many devices has been, quite simply, impractical, so instead they’ve opened up the lower level device calls of the flash player so anyone can port their own.

This particular one I find the most compelling, because of the names that are notably not on the list of partners: Google, Apple and Microsoft. Whether they are still in talks with these companies or not I honestly don’t know, but given that between the iPhone, Google Android and Windows Mobile they have significant sway in the device industry, not having them on the list seems a little odd. Mind you, everyone else is on that list, so I’m wondering if Adobe’s trying to use the community to strongarm those three into adopting their runtime. Consider consumer A, who sees all kind of neat Flash/AIR apps on other devices, but doesn’t see them on his iPhone or his Windows Mobile device. Is he more likely to move? Would someone else be less likely to leave? I don’t know, but the strategic play by play will be very interesting to watch.

Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services

We’ve heard rumors about this, but having these protocols public and formally supported by Adobe (rather than reverse engineered by the community) is a pretty big deal. Open projects like BlazeDS, AMFPHP and WebOrb can now support the entire protocol layers, and I think we’ll soon see live video streaming options for all of those platforms.

Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

Up until recently, Flash for a handheld device cost money. Soon, it won’t. There’s not much to this other than removal of the barriers to adoption for the consumer, and many handheld devices may come with the flash player pre-installed.