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.