Adobe moves further into Google's orbit
For now, however, Adobe and Google have struck a partnership of convenience based on mutual need and mutual distrust of Apple's intentions for the mobile computing market. It's not that Adobe has turned a blind eye to the rest of the mobile computing market: it plans to make Flash available on Research In Motion's BlackBerry software as well as Hewlett-Packard's WebOS and Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Phone 7, company officials said Monday. As for Apple, any chance of detente in that relationship seems unlikely.But Flash will have its most immediate impact on Android, which has surpassed the iPhone and BlackBerry to become the leading smartphone operating system in the U.S. Almost overnight with the release of the Droid 2 last week--the first smartphone to ship with Android 2.2 and Flash Player 10.1 preinstalled--Android users had a wealth of Flash games to choose from, a key selling point against the plethora of games found in Apple's App Store that will get stronger as more and more Android users upgrade to 2.2.More and more serious application developers are starting to think about Android as a viable alternative to the iPhone after years of App Store madness, and the addition of Flash-based opportunities can only help expand the pool of developers creating apps for Android phones (Flash workarounds for the iOS world aren't dependable). The key question for Google and Adobe is whether they can deliver on the performance issues and user-interface weirdness that have plagued Flash on mobile to date, and whether developers start to see as many opportunities in Android as they have in the iPhone.Adobe still makes a lot of money selling "shrink-wrapped" software, such as Photoshop, Lightroom, and software development environments like Dreamweaver. However, no modern tech company can afford to ignore the shift to mobile computing, and for Adobe, the road is being paved by Google.
