The following quotes from Adobe co-founder Charles Geschke appeared in a lengthy interview from Knowledge@Wharton. Here I've pulled together some of the information on corporate culture, as in the prior posts on standards and reinvention.

The earliest impulses behind Adobe were entrepreneurial, about the need to make a real difference in the world:

Knowledge@Wharton: What prompted you and Warnock to leave Xerox?

Geschke: Xerox loved [what we had done]. They said, "We'll make it a corporate standard." I said, "Great!" I went to Connecticut to [Xerox] headquarters and said, "I'm here to talk about the marketing plan for rolling this out." They said, "Oh, wait a minute. At Xerox it takes seven years to develop a product -- and we can't talk about this because other people will get the idea and beat us to market."

I said, "Seven years! [In the] industry you're about to go into, that's two to three generations. By the time you bring it out it will be worthless." [They said,] "Sorry, [it takes] seven years at Xerox."

John and I were frustrated. It turned out that his thesis adviser at the University of Utah was on the board of the investment bank Hambrecht & Quist. Bill Hambrecht was one of the first guys pushing venture investing in high-tech companies....

There were strong lessons, early on, about the need to continually re-check assumptions:

Knowledge@Wharton: When did you enter the Japanese market?

Geschke: We licensed type technology for the Japanese market in 1986 or 1987. [It was] almost the identical situation as with Compugraphic and Linotype.

Originally the Japanese typesetting industry had only one company before World War II. The two guys who ran it got into a disagreement over the Japanese conduct of going to war. One guy was a supporter [of the war effort] and the other was not. So they split the business. One guy stayed in Tokyo and his business took off, because he was at the seat of power. And the other guy took his part of the business to Osaka. He did okay, but he was struggling.

We first went to the Tokyo branch. At that point it was run by a woman, which was quite unusual in Japanese industry. She was the widow of the fellow who had stayed in Tokyo. I could never get to the second cup of tea with her. She just didn't want to talk. She had 90% of the business and she didn't need anything new-fangled.

So we went to Osaka and talked to the other company and, again, because they wanted to get into a stronger position and they intuitively knew the industry was going to change, we did a deal with them. We got the license to their type library and they now have 80% to 90% of the business.

Knowledge@Wharton: As was the case with Linotype, the incumbent wasn't interested, but the underdog was. And it completely changed the fortunes of both companies.

Geschke: I think if you did a study of business deals, it's almost always that way.

The companies that think they're in control of their long-term destiny don't want to talk to a young start-up company that's going to change the rules of the business.

Part of the core philosophy is to strive to treat people fairly, and to also be perceived as treating people fairly. And when there's a challenge, it needs to be surmounted:

Knowledge@Wharton: Okay. What was the response to the Apple-Microsoft announcement at that Seybold Conference?

Geschke: I think if you were to talk to Adobe customers in any era, one of the things they'll tell you is that, while they may have a disagreement about this or that, by and large they were treated fairly. They could depend upon getting great technology licensed to them on a fair and equitable basis. Customers like that. If you treat them the way you like to be treated, they sense that. That was always part of our core philosophy as a company.

At that Seybold Conference, when the announcement was made between Apple and Microsoft, the Seybold people immediately changed the schedule to put a panel on the last day to discuss all of this. Before the panel began, the moderator got up and said, "I want to take a straw vote. I want everyone to raise their hand who thinks they would rather have Apple and Microsoft take over this segment of the business." There were a few hands raised -- I've always believed they were Microsoft and Apple people -- but, basically, no one voted against us. They all wanted Adobe to continue to be their vendor.

We brought ATM out within about 60 days and sold hundreds of thousands of units in the first quarter, which was a lot in those days. It was three years before Apple and Microsoft shipped TrueType.

A business needs to cannibalize itself, otherwise it will be cannibalized by others:

If you're lucky enough to get a "franchise" product like Photoshop, you can't become complacent. For example, when we brought out PhotoDeluxe we were initially the strongest competitor for Photoshop. Rather than cede the low end of the market to someone else, we took it. And that allowed us to upgrade people. With hindsight it was the exactly the right thing to do -- not give someone the ability to undercut you, come in and be "good enough."

We learned that from the LaserJet. [Although a] PostScript [printer like] the LaserWriter was a much better product, eventually the [Hewlett-Packard] LaserJet was good enough. [Although PostScript is] still a profitable business.

Early experience in executive succession showed the necesssity of growing and trusting the "corporate culture":

We kept a pretty lean organization with a pretty shallow management structure. We frankly hadn't done work trying to groom anybody [as a successor], because we weren't thinking about it.

So -- this was not our brightest decision -- we decided we could recruit replacement talent, spend a couple of years with them, get them up to speed, and their natural abilities would take over.

We hired three or four very bright people, [people who were] very successful in their previous businesses and had the right pedigree to run a business like Adobe. We figured we would meld them into a team.

Well, each one of them thought that he should be the future CEO of the company. Rather than melding as a team, they fought like cats. It became miserable. It was impossible to have a staff meeting without it breaking out into angry disputes. It was getting ugly. Because of people trying to build turf, spending was getting ahead of revenue. And in the summer of 1998, the Japanese market went off a cliff for six months. It just stopped. I've never fully understood why it happened. And we found ourselves having to preannounce a very bad quarter and dealing with these people who weren't getting along.

John and I decided that we would fire all of them on the same day.

We identified the person -- Bruce Chizen -- we wanted to groom from the inside...

[Corporate succession] is hard. If you want to give real value to your shareholders and build a company that has a long life, you realize pretty quickly that that is a major problem and you've got to start working on it. We should have been brighter and known that we couldn't go outside; you have to do it from the inside.

I have always believed that the principles and values of the company you build is an important ingredient in its success. You can't get someone to come in from the outside and just pick that up in a six-month training period. It doesn't work that way. Not everybody agrees with some of those principles -- they think they have to do it a different way.

How to have a group endure and be successful over time, despite different personalities, different problems, different opportunities?

Knowledge@Wharton: It seems like you've tried to maintain the consistency of Adobe's corporate culture even as the company's technology focus has evolved.

Geschke: We really didn't start emphasizing [corporate culture] until roughly 1989.

When we began, John and I wanted to build a company that we would like to work in. Why would you build a business you didn't want to work in?

We both had enough experience that we knew there were a lot of things we felt we shouldn't do and had some ideas about things that we thought were important to do. But we didn't really start verbalizing it until it became clear that, as we got bigger and we had to confront tough things, we needed to make sure that everybody understood and could help us enunciate what those principles were, what that culture was about, and make this ingrained in how the business ran...

One of the things I talk a lot about is the necessity to juggle all of the constituencies that have an interest in the business: shareholders, customers, employees, vendors, and the communities in which we operate. Those constituencies are all mildly in conflict with one another in terms of what's best for them. Your job as a leader in a company is to find an appropriate way to juggle those conflicting interests so everybody feels like they're getting a fair deal, without letting any one dominate the others because they'll drag your company down.

(I like that final quote an awful lot, so I BOLDed it.)

When you're making bets on technology, it helps to predict what might happen in the future. Adobe may some day act unfairly, that's true. It's also true that Microsoft may some day act benevolently, or Apple some day may act openly... Google may some day act respectfully, or the W3C may act efficiently. All these things are possible, but each group of people grows a culture which affects their future decisions.

The future isn't always predicted by the past, but the past always predicts the future.

Want to predict how Adobe will act? Look at its past. Groups develop different cultures, and knowing how a group "works" gives big clues on its future. This Knowledge@Wharton interview with Adobe co-founder Charles Geschke can give you deep background on how the people of Adobe look at things.

Yesterday I pulled out a section on core history with standards... the "open" model with PostScript, PDF and SWF is very similar to the model with HTML, JavaScript and CSS. Here's a section on how the company has reinvented itself a few times, from turnkey systems provider to PostScript licensing to shrinkwrap software for a consumer channel, then enterprise, and now the various web models.

The early company was based on the idea of providing complete digital printing systems to the types of large companies which were then investing in early computers for database and processing:

Bill Hambrecht was one of the first guys pushing venture investing in high-tech companies. We told him our plan, which was to build a complete turnkey publishing system -- the computers, the printers, the typesetting equipment, everything -- and sell it to the Fortune 500 so they could bring a lot of their production work in house. He liked the idea because he hated financial printers. Every time he did a prospectus he felt that he was being robbed. He agreed to invest $2.5 million over two years in two equal payments and told us we would have to quit our jobs....

But once they started meeting with potential customers and partners, a need arose which was greater than that for printing systems integration. Both Digital Equipment and Apple had computers themselves, and had printer deals, but were stuck at getting the two to work together -- to be able to create and edit a document with a computer at screen resolution, and have it be understood by a printer at high resolution.

Knowledge@Wharton: This is how Adobe began as a printer software company?

Geschke: Yes. We developed the [PostScript] language after we left PARC. What really caught people's attention was what we were doing in terms of rendering type on-the-fly from outlines [the curves used to define the characters of a typeface at any size or angle].

Popular mythology at the time said that couldn't be done; you have to hire a bunch of monks to build bitmaps. We knew that wouldn't fly because we really wanted [to do] arbitrary expansion and contraction [of the typefaces]. You could never have enough bitmaps or enough typefaces to satisfy the printing world. It was just infeasible. You had to do it from outlines. We eventually developed software that did that and continue to use it today.

(It's funny... what PostScript did with curves-to-dots across early computers and printers, Flash did with vector rendering in the early web-browsers. It's hard to remember today, but the big reason people first started noticing Flash was that it used "scalable vector graphics" for smooth drawings regardless of resolution, offering very small filesizes for large drawings of low detail.)

PostScript was cloned and resold by competitors, but the Adobe implementation finally ended up as the most important in the printing ecology it spawned. But at this point a new need emerged: the need to be able to actually design with the new publishing technology. A new type of business needed to be invested in and developed, that of software which could be sold to individuals. This was not easy:

Knowledge@Wharton: How was it to go from being a company that sold printer software to OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] to being a shrink-wrapped desktop software company with products like Illustrator and Photoshop?

Geschke: It was a "come to Jesus" moment inside the company, because all the profits were being made by PostScript. As we began to invest in not only development, which was relatively inexpensive -- just a few people -- but more importantly in building a sales and marketing presence in the retail channel, we were chewing up resources. It was difficult in the early days to demonstrate profitability in that business. Every time we would have a budget debate, you can imagine how that went: "I'm bringing in most of the money. I should be getting these resources."

Knowledge@Wharton: What motivated you to stick with this second line of business?

Geschke: One of the obvious lessons in business is that you can't continue to be a one product company and survive. We also felt we couldn't be a one channel company and survive. We were captive of those OEMs [of PostScript printers]. If they ever decided to drop us, we [would have been] toast. We had no channel.

John's wife was -- and is -- a graphic designer. John had a second job [when he went] home at night writing PostScript code to do what she wanted to do on the LaserWriter. He got a couple of engineers to come up with Illustrator. We launched Illustrator and it did very well.

We realized then that we spent a lot of money to build a retail channel and a sales force and we had to feed it. There had to be more products....

Turnkey provider, to printer software developer, to digital creative tools sold at retail. The next jump was to dealing with entire documents across all types of machines, rather than just isolated files. The Portable Document Format and Adobe Acrobat were the next round of investment, development, and ultimately worldly innovation:

Knowledge@Wharton: For a long time it cost Adobe more to develop and market Acrobat than the revenue it returned.

Geschke: Oh yeah, the antibodies inside the company were just all over it.

Knowledge@Wharton: People wanted to kill the product?

Geschke: Of course, because they said, "Look, we're selling all this Photoshop. We're selling all these printers. Why the hell are we investing in this thing, and giving it away?"

Knowledge@Wharton: Why did you continue to invest in Acrobat for so long? What gave you the confidence to continue to pour money into it?

Geschke: Your own instincts. You can't analyze a market that has never existed.

This theme, of radically changing the company to fulfill what the future requires, continues today:

We instinctively knew that was where things were going. The only business book that John and I ever read, and the only chapter that I remember from it was a chapter entitled "Market Gap Analysis." The one idea I remember was that it is easier to build a business if you find a new solution to an already perceived problem that no one has come out with before -- because you instantly are [at] 100% market share.

We did that with PostScript, we did that with Illustrator, and we were going to do it with Photoshop even though we knew we were going in early. And it has worked out very well.

We did the same thing with Acrobat. We brought Acrobat out about three years before the Internet really took off, thinking that local area networking would be enough to support it, but it wasn't.

And we're trying to do the same thing with AIR [the Adobe Integrated Runtime development platform for cross-operating system software]: Bring it out before anyone else has the idea of the concept, get the platform established, and then shame on us if we can't make money off it.

Knowledge@Wharton: While the technology has changed greatly over the past two decades, there appears to be a certain consistency in Adobe's business strategy.

True. And where does this lead?

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think is the biggest challenge Adobe is facing going forward?

Geschke: Inventing the future. We'll never succeed unless we continue to open up new vistas.

I honestly believe that our technology and what's happening in the market -- where essentially all visual communication is going to the web -- is the sweetheart point in our whole envelope of products and technologies. Shame on us if we can't figure out a way to take advantage of that shift in the way the world is moving with the distribution of information.

A lot of what are there today -- the limitations of browsers and of the web imaging standards -- are things that we think we have a solution for.

There's indeed "a certain consistency" in all this. It's "inventing the future."

From seeing the need for general digital publishing, to changing the business to focus on a gap in the ecology, to expanding outwards to the creation of standalone software and a retail channel, to the building of a document business, and now to the building of a universal media-application platform... each "molting" of the business required a clear commitment to the next generation of growth... betting big on that inevitability which cannot yet be proven. You can see the newest stage of this evolution today.

Adobe invents new things. Its natural disposition is to generate solutions for new problems, to anticipate needs for which there is yet no solution. Adobe then opens up the results, and makes them universally accessible, as the very key to its success. When one generation of problem is addressed, the company bets hard on solutions for the next important problem.

If you want to know how Adobe will act in its future, then look at how consistently it has acted in its past.

I've been reading and re-reading this interview with Charles Geschke since it appeared last week. There's a lot that's pertinent to today's issues.

Here they discuss how PostScript... well, read it yourself first, and I'll add some of my own reactions at the bottom....

Knowledge@Wharton: From the beginning, you documented the specification for the PostScript language.

Geschke: Yes. We published the spec about three or four months before the first LaserWriter shipped.

Knowledge@Wharton: These days this is fairly common practice to help establish a standard platform, but it was much less common back then. Was this merely a practical necessity because people needed to write software to drive PostScript printers or was this a strategic move to establish PostScript as a standard?

Geschke: It wasn't strategic in the sense that we understood this would become a standard way of doing business. It was the only way we could figure out to get the hardware manufacturers and the software developers and the platform vendors to collaborate. You couldn't do independent deals with each of them because there would always be somebody left out.

If you really wanted to make it a standard -- and our goal from the beginning was to have it be a universal standard -- you have to publish. You just have no choice. You're taking the risk that someone will do a better job of implementing it. We had the self confidence that we would always have the best implementation, and that has turned out to be true.

Knowledge@Wharton: A lot of PostScript clones did come along eventually.

Geschke: At one time there were over 75 of them.

Knowledge@Wharton: Did it ever worry you that they would start to chip away at your market share?

Geschke: No. But it turned out that Microsoft acquired one of them.

Knowledge@Wharton: From Bauer Enterprises.

Geschke: Right. TrueImage, they called it. Microsoft did a deal to license TrueImage [to Apple] and Apple would license TrueType to Microsoft. That was pretty scary for us.

Knowledge@Wharton: When did you first hear about the Microsoft-Apple partnership for TrueImage and TrueType?

Geschke: A few days before it was announced....

(More on the TrueImage/TrueType story: [1], [2].)

The "PostScript Red Book" was the language specification, and the "Blue Book" was a language tutorial and cookbook. Adobe decided how PostScript evolved, true -- it was corporate governance, not consortium governance (and you could argue that a company listens to its customers better than a consortium does) -- but PostScript was free, open, documented, and internally competitive back in the 1980s.

PDF did the same thing in the early 90s -- Adobe was open with "how PDFs act", even though it didn't give away its recipe for "how to make it act that way". In the late 90s Macromedia did the same thing with SWF, saying "here's how a SWF file should act".

Like HTML, the spec told you how a file should behave, and didn't need to include sourcecode to a particular application.

If you really wanted to make it a standard -- and our goal from the beginning was to have it be a universal standard -- you have to publish. You just have no choice. You're taking the risk that someone will do a better job of implementing it. We had the self confidence that we would always have the best implementation, and that has turned out to be true.

That's history. The important thing for today? This mindset permeates Adobe. This is the corporate memory. This is what drove the evolution of the group, its beliefs, its understandings.

To achieve something new and useful, you have to have allies. You have to be clear in what you're trying to do, and commit to it with a public specification, a promise of how functionality "should" behave. There's the risk another group will undercut you, but it's a risk which must be accepted if you hope to achieve progress.

From what I've seen since the Macromedia acquisition, this awareness on open formats to encourage consensus upon innovative technology runs throughout the company even today. And, from what Adobe's founder tells above, it was there from the start, before The Web, even before The Internet publicly opened up.

Read the interview again. To bring about a new technology ecology, Adobe continually commits to a public specification, drawing in both partners and competitors, and trusts to innovate quickly within that new, growing area.

If you want to understand Adobe, it's essential to understand this cultural memory of opening up, becoming vulnerable, yet innovating quickly.

When Silverlight announced the MLB.com deal, lots of people said Flash and Silverlight would then be comparable. But long after the press release, the eventual website was still Flash, and the common forum advice was likely why we didn't hear much later about what this campaign did for adoption.

Then NBCOlympics.com deal and demconvention.com were prophesied to close the desktop gap with Flash, rendering the technologies equivalent. I've heard quotes like 50 million unique visitors for the first and 30 for the second, but no word on how many of those succeeded in watching video, rates of successful installation and so on. It has been mysteriously quiet.

Until today. Microsoft announced that H.264 video will be "in a future version of Silverlight", and also let slip some stats on "How did Silverlight do at the Olympics?"

"On the Silverlight-enhanced NBC Olympics site, the average viewing time was over 27 minutes, as opposed to an average of just three minutes on some Flash-powered sites broadcasting Olympics coverage elsewhere. We think this indicates Silverlight provides a more compelling, engaging and rich media experience for viewers."

This is the press release, the first after the event to put the whole Silverlight/Olympics storyline into final context. If there was good news, this is when we'd hear it trumpeted. If there was neutral or poor news, this is when we'd hear it managed. And the most important statistic mustered? An observation on the average size of YouTube files.

It seems to say a lot, but somehow, I'm not sure it will change the debate.... ;-)

Look, it's great that Microsoft is trying to refactor WMP and CLR to fit in webpages, like Flash. It's great that Firefox is adding Ogg Theora, and that Google Chrome is trying to build a generic HTML-driven application shell. If Ajax gurus can make HTML apps smoother, then that's a big help to the world. Java FX moving towards the Flash vision? I'm all for it.

I could do without the negative stereotypes, but having everyone agree on this "experience matters" approach is a good thing.

The more options, the better.

But... you know... not all of these technologies work equally well in the real world. Most websites can't afford to turn audience away. You hear such objections to Shockwave, even though 60% of computers already run it.

The "software wars" are fun to debate and evangelize online, but all that extra rhetoric makes it harder for people to learn about and actually use these technologies in the world. Confusion costs.

Even newspapers frequently lump Flash and Silverlight together. I guess the brandnames fall into the same basket, for the reporter. But for readers, one has a near-prohibitive cost to use. How much of your audience can you afford to turn away? The reporter isn't doing the reader any favors by suggesting either technology can be used equally.

Same with video. What types of sites can afford to use Ogg Theora? Commercial video sites won't change their existing On2 VP6, Windows Media or H.264 production workflows to move to a codec considered outdated in 2001. I can see Wikipedia using On2 VP3, but how many other sites can afford it?

A fast scripting engine, eating platform-neutral files to run fast OS-native code for datagrids and 3D and games? How much of your audience must arrive in that brand of JavaScript runtime before you can afford to use it?

The more options, the better, true. But that doesn't mean they're all equal. The namecalling and fake drama can only distract, not hide this.

Flash just works. Back in June, 85% of consumers already supported H.264 on their computers. Forrester says 97% in enterprise have a JIT. It's all open and free to use, right there on the world's desktops.

You can actually use it. That's what distinguishes Flash. How can there be a debate?

This is not an exclusive dinner party, this little RIA-in-the-browser soiree. You're welcome to come, and it's flattering that you'd like join in. Glad to have you here! But it's a potluck dinner, so you really might want to bring something, other than announcements of how next time you'll bring something, and saying (between mouthfuls) how much better it will taste than this evening's poor proprietary fare.... ;-)

I don't have the answer, but I do have some context, observations. (Warning: This is long, and the only useful info in it is how to think about problem description. If you've got real work to do, then don't waste time reading my blogpost here.... ;-)

First and most important, the way to confirm that you have addressed an issue is by being able to make the problem occur on demand, and to tell others how they can also make it happen on demand. That way they can test whether they can stop it from occurring.

A "Steps to Reproduce" is not what you must do to see the problem. A "Steps to Reproduce" is what an engineer needs to do to see the problem. You may not be able to instruct others completely, and knowing what you did is certainly a first step, but a steps-to-repro description should be written from the reader's point of view, not the writer's.

And intermittent problems are certainly the most difficult and timeconsuming to address. We need to be able to make the problem happen with assurance, in order to assure that it has been truly removed.

Check out the comments in the thread -- "I read in a forum that someone else had the problem too" -- that's not a useful comment. If a capability is not working on your system, then we all believe you, and want to improve things. There's no need to prove that other people have it. What we need to do is to be able to see it ourselves, so that we can test whether we can make it go away successfully. You don't need to validate yourself. We all need to explore the argument. It's not you, it's it. Relax, we believe you.

There's one comment from the original poster (identified solely as "M Z") that "No, I have not managed to reproduce it in safe mode." This is potentially a killer bit of info. I'm assuming he means "Windows Safe Mode", an F8-key start which disables many system customizations. If the problem actually *never* occurs with system customizations turned off, then we know to look more closely at the system customizations. But unfortunately, the description is amibiguous... might mean that he rarely tests in OS "safe mode" just as well. Tantalizing, but still less-than-fully-useful.

Someone asks "What Firefox extensions do you have installed?" and then various lists are produced. It's more useful to know whether the problem still occurs with a stock Firefox installation. If you ever see the symptom on that system when not running any browser customizations, then we'll have more info than knowing which brands and versions of extensions you've customized the browser with. Key refactoring: "Have you ever seen the problem when all Firefox extensions have been turned off?" Even one such incident would exculpate all extensions.

Someone identifying themself only as "el3000@gmail.com" offers another potentially useful bit of detail: "I encounter it only after FF has been running for a while (>60 min)." The original-poster needs to be asked whether he has ever seen the problem immediately at system/browser startup, or whether it also needs a significant period of browser use before the problem has ever appeared. If so, I would also ask them to look at their Windows Task Manager, to see how much memory their copy of Firefox is currently using. In the past, media dropout has often been associated with low-memory situations. It wouldn't be too hard to quantify the current reports, to see whether the well-known Firefox memory consumption issues are in play when they lose audio/video.

Subsequent comments of "I have the same problem" do not help at all. No one doubts the original reporter. But these low-info confirmations just muddy the discussion, making a resolution more difficult to reach.

There are additional contributions such as "the problem is your adobe flash player version". That's it, no citation, no reason offered. This is a great example of why public bugbases should be scrubbed for buggy comments. The conversation may be open to this person's participation, but he is increasing readership costs for everyone else. A group needs a smart mix of inclusion and exclusion in order to function well.

Mike Beltzner, a Mozilla staffer, makes a little progress with this comment: "Can we at least call this Windows only? I haven't seen any reports of it happening in other OSes." He's trying to craft a recipe for reproduction of the problem. If we can be sure it's Windows-only, then we'd know an engineer shouldn't bother trying to reproduce it on a Mac. It's a start.

Let's switch back to Rafe's article. It's got the headline "Why can't they fix the Flash/Firefox bug?" This sets off warning lights for me, because of his use of the word "the"... implies that there is only a single problem, and that it's famous. In reality, it's not even yet well-defined. There are also semantic issues with the rhetorical "why", as well as the cognitive issue of knowing what the problem actually is before starting to think about whether it is possible to fix it. When I read a loaded phrase like that, I start wondering how well the writer has started thinking about what they will be writing about. Not a big flag, but a small warning flag of possible confusion ahead.

"Both Mozilla and Adobe have been aware of the issue since late May, but as yet no solution has been found." It would be fairer to see that no way to reproduce it on demand has yet been found. The current stopping-block is in the original descriptions, not in any lack of effort by people writing code.

"One workaround solution is to install the Flash 10 player, which is still in beta." I have no assurance that this changes the problem... in the Bugzilla talk we haven't seen that anyone who has had the symptom has been able to make it go away by using Astro, and make it return by going back to Player 9.

Matter of fact, after reading Rafe's article we don't know whether he has been able to see the problem himself. I sorta suspect he might have, which would explain his interest in this one not-yet-fully-formed Bugzilla entry, but there's zip info on his personal work at reproduction of the issue.

(Later: Yes! Down at the very bottom he says that he sees the problem too, but that he doesn't see it in Internet Explorer. Not much more detail, but it'd be useful if he contributed to the solution.)

There's a quote from Mike Beltzner that implies "ah, if only all Player code were published, then the problem would be easy to solve." Baloney. [expletives deleted] Mike should know, from Mozilla's experience with the Tamarin Project, the massive study curve that even brilliant new engineers need to do to get up to speed, to understand what is going on. And Tamarin is just one small part of the tiny engineering marvel which is Adobe Flash Player.

"He also took a minute to trumpet Mozilla's open-source philosophy. Since Firefox's code is open, Adobe can look at it to try to determine what is going on. But Mozilla's team can't look into Flash. Beltzner didn't blame Adobe for the bug itself, but he did say that Adobe's traditional closed software architecture is slowing down their investigation. 'We hit a wall when it's a closed-source solution,' he said."

The truth is that you simply need to distill the public complaint into an actionable item. The problem actually lies in Bugzilla's conversational style. Right now it's just "Oh I saw someone on a forum describe a similar thing." You need to show engineers how they can see it. Playing the "proprietary" card instead is just weak. I'm watching my language here, but....

Comments at Webware are interesting. Too bad they close it off by registration (yeah, like I'm going to open new accounts and track new passwords for each special little site), and too bad some commenters hide their identity when commenting on others. (Tip to indy Silverlight evangelists: Including a verifiable identity will reduce the taint of possible astroturfing.) The comments section is not very useful overall, but there's some realistic thought in there, which I appreciate, thanks.

I'm with Rafe completely on his penultimate paragraph: "Finger pointing is common in software troubleshooting, and I give both Mozilla and Adobe credit for only generally waving, not pointing, their fingers at each other. Unfortunately, neither team seems to have developers who can reproduce this issue, which just keeps the ping-pong game going." Making the problem occur on demand is the first necessary step in making sure the problem has really gone away.

But his final paragraph seems like rankest fantasy and fairytale to me: "What I find most interesting is the way the differing philosophies of Mozilla and Adobe are slowing down resolution of this issue. If both companies were open then any developer--at Mozilla, Adobe, or elsewhere--could get into things and start experimenting to find a fix. If both companies had closed philosophies then their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source code, and together fix the issue."

To solve the problem quickly, focus on what it is.

Summary: From the little I can see in the descriptions, I'd really want to check reporters' system memory consumption when the problem occurs... not a sure thing, but a quick and easy diagnostic that may zero-in on the cause of the problem. (To put it gently, Firefox is rather famous for its memory issues.)

Bugzilla needs (imho) to tighten down, get rid of the conversational bloat. Doing tech support is an acquired skill, and not everyone can think directly about a problem, but a good bugbase would instruct new contributors on how to help isolate the true problem, how to describe things so that others can usefully attempt to reproduce it. Readers should not have to read through stream-of-consciousness from strangers. Refactor it, make it functional.

And finally, that line "but it's proprietary" needs to go away. It's a replacement for branding issues. Even Apple, the most proprietary, closed, secretive company of them all, reflexively reaches for it when they don't know what else to say. You and I have near-zero chance to influence the W3C or Mozilla to do something -- they are not more "open" in process than Adobe, or even Microsoft. "Opensource" code tweakability means more for things which run on your own machines (Linux, Apache) rather than on everybody else's machines, when "predictability" becomes more valuable. I'm tired of conversations getting derailed when someone resorts to this weak "proprietary" tactic. Think. We need you to think. Just be honest and think. Quit the blaming and think.

And check your system memory if video stops. Not a guarantee, but it's a start.

Hear me out before judging. I'm pretty surprised at having such a thought myself, so I'm still looking for ways to invalidate it. If you've got a good argument, I'd like to hear it. But it's a simple thought, and so seems strong.

We do know that "Flash subverting The Web" and such are bandied about. The rap is that you "shouldn't" rely upon the Adobe runtime because it's "not HTML, CSS and JavaScript". When asked why, the most common response is something along the lines of "Because Adobe might do something bad someday." (At this point I want to ask, "What, like they did with PostScript or PDF?" ;-)

According to the best stats I've seen -- Google worldwide queries Jan07-Jun08, over a billion browsers -- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 is still used by almost 40% of the people out there. That's a lot. Beyond that, there's also about 40% of the world using Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. Another big audience. Beyond that, Firefox? One person out of six... 16%. A meaningful audience, but still, only one person out of every six. Safari has half the remainder, Opera is bigger on mobile, and 1.4% use even rarer browser brands.

Microsoft has overwhelming, crushing marketshare in rendering websites' HTML. 80% of the time your JavaScript will run in a Microsoft logic engine, against a Microsoft DOM, with Microsoft styling, and it's 50/50 whether you'll be running inside IE6 or 7. A TV network is ecstatic to get a 40% marketshare. A political party is completely satisfied with a 51% marketshare. Google dominates search with 60% marketshare.

For running Ajax, Microsoft has an 80% marketshare.

You can't choose. Your audience makes their own choice. And 80% of the time they choose a Microsoft runtime to render your HTML, CSS, and JS productions. Microsoft runs your code for you.

When you create an HTML page, 80% of people will view it in a Microsoft runtime. A pure "web standards" site from a CSS guru? Four out of every five people will see it rendered by a Microsoft runtime. A JavaScript application which can retrieve text from a server without refreshing the page? Your scripting will overwhelmingly be interpreted by a Microsoft runtime.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, getting close to 50%. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, dropping down towards 30%. Mozilla Firefox, less than 20%. Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and more which must be supported.

But inevitably rendered 80% of the time in a Microsoft runtime.

(I know, I know, there is the promise that the standards process will someday Shame Microsoft Into Doing The Right Thing, and that Firefox must eventually rule the world, and "Better IE than SL!", but please bear with me, I was born a skeptical fella.... ;-)

If you're objecting to Adobe runtimes "because they're proprietary", then why would it be preferable to run nearly-all-the-time in Microsoft runtimes instead?

Such a simple question, seems like it should have a simple answer....

This forum thread seems to have the most descriptions (possibly of multiple issues), but the screenshots and partial descriptions don't seem to mention any particular SWF at MSNBC.com. As in previous Flash warnings through this venue, it's hard to summarize the main evidence, drawn from various disconnected forum posts. Dan Goodin said Sandi mentioned Flash, but I didn't see where she did (other than with her weblog template about "flash malvertizements"). There's not yet a succinct case.

It's plausible that some webpage has some rogue SWF which acts obnoxiously with the clipboard. Might be a JavaScript thing too. But let's say that there's indeed some rogue browser element which just yak-yak-yaks into your clipboard.

Two questions:
1) How did you get to be executing some logic which acts so obnoxiously?
2) If you're using a browser to surf the web, should strangers have so much power?

(The answers are already here, but let's run it fresh again anyway.... ;-)

How'd some rogue interactivity get into your browser? Probably because of a trustworthy webpage with untrustworthy third-party content. Ad networks are big vectors for third-party resources. Web-based services are another way to introduce third-party scripting into a composite webpage. Even a third-party GIF can no longer be completely trusted. Sandi's page is pretty secure, but even this is executing scripts from three domains... the article at The Register is executing scripts from six different domains.

As Nat Torkington described, if you're republishing third-party JavaScript, even trustworthy sources may prove untrustworthy. If you're accepting interactivity through an ad network, then they don't seem to have formal processes to vet the people they forward to you for republishing.

If you use Firefox and AdBlock Plus, or have another way of inspecting third-party content on webpages, take a look at just how many domains are involved in creating the page you're viewing. Each HTTP request for a GIF or a JavaScript or an RSS or even a ping is registered on a server log at those unanticipated third-party sites, and for interactivity (.SWF, .JS, whatever), your browser will be accepting instructions from parties other than the site you're visiting. Modern sites like TechCrunch invoke dozens of scripts and ping even more domains whenever you visit.

Should webpages have so much power, as to be able to copy to the clipboard? Probably not, because you can't trust everyone else we allow on the network. Early email architects didn't imagine spam, but spam is what we got. If we want to safely click from link to hypertext link on the World Wide Web, the most stable solution is to give the browser experience few privileges.

(The alternative (which failed for Microsoft in the 1990s, and which Google is reviving in a different way with their search warnings) is the concept of giving some groups of publishers greater trust than others, which leads into an additional class of permission-raising exploits, spoofing, and so on, as well as all the subsequent social opposition from the less-privileged classes. In these days, when even your local domain-name server can't always be trusted, favoritism doesn't scale at all well.)

Web browsers need to be able to safely visit any hypertext link, safely execute any instructions they may contain. To gain greater privileges, it seems smarter to use a separate codebase with a more generous sandbox, than it is to set up permission schemes. This is the fundamental reason that I believe the various brands of WWW browsers won't be able to act very much like desktop apps... the needs of visiting any strange site safely conflict directly with the needs to be trusted and powerful parts of your daily environment. Theoretically possible; pragmatically fragile.

Anyway, on this story at The Register, I haven't yet been able to identify the exact situation from the descriptions. Clipboard-spamming does seem a possibility. And the trends of composite webpages with third-party content makes it increasingly difficult for in-browser apps to act like desktop apps.

Summary: This report needs further investigation.

Biggest takeaway: People like rich video experiences. The big sitback screen is still first choice... broadcast served far more traffic than Web. Pundits who argue "Web vs TV" are missing that it's "Web *and* TV". But when people can experience a "Video RIA" they like it. Good validation.

But when people are excluded, they don't like it. Microsoft was heard as saying "we're bringing Olympics to the world", and only later people realized this was a US-only deal. Linux users were cut out, as were Mac/PPC owners. Then 10% of US broadband folks were cut out atop that. Microsoft would have drawn less criticism were they a little more realistic in setting expectations.

What are the numbers for Silverlight? Hard to say... still seem contradictory. Nielsen Online says in an Aug 13 press release that the video section of NBCOlympics.com received 2,030,000 unique visitors on Mon Aug 11. Microsoft is saying they got eight million "downloads" one day. When you combine geo-restriction, platform-restriction, and failed installations, the NBC site may have prompted a million successful installations one day. Looks teeny.

Whatever the actual numbers turn out to be, it doesn't seem to mean much for making Silverlight deployment to the general public any more practical... a site would still have to eat those support costs. I risk turning RIAstats.com into a gaming target by mentioning it, but Saturday morning still shows less than 2% Silverlight 2 support. The DNC doesn't seem like it will change this either. The numbers are still fuzzy, but it seems pretty clear Silverlight's silver bullet shot blanks.

Still unclear to me is the mobile angle. Some US-oriented quotes seem to show this at 25% of the desktop browser video viewing. Considering there are probably device restrictions, atop the OS restrictions and geo-restrictions, this could be a big deal. Needs more detail.

Also unclear so far is the overall global picture, and how people worldwide actually used web video this Olympics. China has a bigger internet audience than the US, and much more interest in the games themselves... news services uniformly use Flash video these days... regional licensees seemed to mostly deliver in non-beta software their audiences could actually view... there was massive peer-to-peer delivery this time as well.

It will take awhile for the world to really understand this worldwide video event. Signs look good that it changed expectations in a positive and useful way. We humans do like smarter video. Good sign.

Two other bits this week, Microsoft-related, but not Olympics:

ECMAScript fell down and went boom. The best numbers I've seen show IE6 at 40% marketshare, IE7 at 40%, and Opera/Firefox/Safari/etc at 20%. That's the real world. For the specification process, ECMAScript has been working on its next version for almost a decade. It's been clear for a year Microsoft won't implement it, and so the world won't support it. End of story. HTML, CSS and JavaScript continue to evolve relatively slowly. Makes the whole VIDEO/RIA/Aurora predictions seem even more unrealistic. [nb: I rewrote this paragraph an hour after initial post.]

ISO fell down and went boom, too. Microsoft pushed through the OOXML proposal. Doesn't matter that no one can implement it, and perhaps no one might even want to implement it... Microsoft Office is no longer barred from governmental purchase because it's not a politically-mandated "open standard". Circus all around on that one.

Put those two items together and it gets really silly... Microsoft saying "ooh ES4 is too hard for us to implement" (despite it being already deployed to over 90% of consumer machines today!), then pushing through "an open standard" that even they can't implement. Just business, not personal.

Anyway, for in-the-browser delivery, it's still "Flash Just Works". I can understand that committed .NET developers might want to believe otherwise, and those heavily invested in cross-browser JavaScript 1.x frameworks might want to believe otherwise, but no amount of bloviation changes the basics. Adobe Flash Player provides universal publishing capability, and truly rapid evolution atop that. The Adobe Integrated Runtime is bringing this beyond-the-browser, to trusted Internet apps. Flash Just Works.

And people do indeed like live video communications. The trend's our friend.

I micro-blogged this earlier today on Twitter, but want to call out some main topics in the weblog.

An intro to video delivery choices:

The video you see in BBC iPlayer today is encoded using the On2 VP6 codec, at a bitrate of 500Kbps. The On2 codec (a video compression technology from a company called On2) is pretty much the standard for video delivery over the internet today. It's optimised for moderately low data rates (300Kbps to 700Kbps, rather than the 2Mbps to 4Mbps needed for HD content), and low CPU usage, allowing it to work reasonably well on older computers. In short, On2 VP6 is the video workhorse of the internet.

... Compared to On2 VP6, H.264 delivers sharper video quality at a lower data rate, but requires more CPU power to decode, particularly on older machines, and the user needs to have the latest version of Flash installed.

Back in December of last year, relatively few people had installed the Flash player needed to play H.264 content; now almost 80% of BBC iPlayer users have it. More machines now have graphics cards with H.264 hardware acceleration. Additionally, Level3, a content distribution network (CDN) is now able to stream H.264 content to ISPs in the UK, and the content encoding workflows that we use (Anystream and Telestream) are now able to support H.264.

... The good news for those looking for video quality improvements in BBC iPlayer is that, starting this week, we're going to be encoding our content in H.264 format at 800Kbps. Additionally, our media player now supports hardware acceleration in full-screen mode, giving a greatly improved image at lower CPU usage than before.

So they've got the clientside runtime technology already installed (Adobe Flash Player), and the production workflow almost migrated (changing to MainConcept encoders), and their content distribution network is about ready to go H.264 too.

Final element? User experience. You can't yank peoples' habits, expectations out from under them. That's why the release will be in stages. First stage is offering parallel VP6 and H264, with VP6 as default, and H264 available via a "Play high quality" button. Once this is realworld-tested, the next stage is to turn on automatic bitrate detection, meaning that H264 will become the default on good connections. The stage after that would be analyzing bandwidth changes and audience desire. They're getting their feedback a little at a time, not asking the viewing audience to change to too much, too quickly, without recourse.

Also see Erik Huggers, who gives the larger picture about the move.

In comments at Anthony Rose's technical discussion: "Is this new codec going to be compatable with the Nintendo Wii?" This is a tough question... but it's a valid question. iPhone and PlayStation owners ask the same thing. Nokia Internet Tablet, iRiver, and many other devices achieve standard capability via Adobe Flash Player. But it did take awhile before office printers standardized on Adobe PostScript... there will always devices which don't include standard capabilities, especially during the early days.

Innovative file-format types do tend to be commodified over time... bitmap formats work better across devices now, and text is easier than in the early years. Mozilla will be adding the On2 VP3 codec next year, as has Opera. But I imagine it would be expensive for realworld video production workflows to distribute an additional older format of compressed video for a minority audience... desirable, sure, but expensive. See how it goes.

You've got to get all four legs of the stool solid: the production workflow, the distribution process, the clientside capability, and then the user experience. The BBC is a good example of how a video production group actually goes about this testing. I'm glad the BBC is so open about how they're bringing about this work.

Lots of commentary the past few days focused on the details, but I think it's more the overall shape that's important. Wouldn't you want seamless synching among devices, and wall displays, and integrated telecommunications, and more satisfying interface customization, and easy data capture/transformation, and strong location-awareness? Those seem like good things. I'd like to see them happen.

Whether a particular comp's interface is "busy" or context-menu design isn't as important to me... practically, multiple implementations of interfaces would eventually handle these different audience needs. I'm looking at the overall direction, and I definitely like it. There's other stuff to accomplish too, true, but what I see in the video are good directions in which to strive.

You and I can see ways to accomplish lots of this lifestyle today... I had fun watching the video and thinking how it might have been produced. ;-) But it's not yet a widespread and easy way of using digital devices. If the Aurora videos can bring more people into believing that these are important goals, then that's to all our benefit.

(I'm not sure of the video's focus on "Web and Browsers" instead of the larger "Net and Clients". We need an ability to visit any published page in the world without fear. Doing that with the same codebase as extreme personalization seems trickier than the alternatives. I see future computing as more of an Internet thing than just a Web Browser thing. But that's a separate issue, as is the video compression.)

Check out the series of four videos, if you get the chance this week. There's some good stuff in there, and I think this campaign will be successful in getting more people anticipating these evolutions.

Blast from the past: Kevin Lynch, 2003, device cooperation.

Update: Fixed two typos about Player 9 release dates... originally read "2006", should have been "2007".

Bottom line: Clicking on links in social media is like not washing your hands after being out in public -- you just can't know what you will pick up.

The part that worries me the most is the "says it's Adobe Flash" part. We've seen such impersonation before with files ("Naked Wife", eg). But to actually impersonate a very well-known runtime? I'm not sure how that will play out. Some people will fall for it, and I feel for them, but most would see through it. Still, some real people will be hurt.

David Lenoe, from Adobe's Security Team, had a blogpost up about it today. I don't think that the people who need that reminder would ever see it though. I'm still concerned.

Adobe is not directly involved, but the infection relies upon using the existing goodwill towards the overall Adobe Flash ecology... without all those sites which made Flash a standard, this social exploitation would not work. (And Ryan's article doesn't clearly state whether the link is to an .HTM, .EXE, or other file, so it's unclear to me yet whether URL-shortening services are currently enabling the exploit.)

A bigger bottom line: Someone out there in the world is going to get their bank accounts stolen because they saw a dialog that said "Adobe Flash" and they said "Okay". I don't feel right about that.

Do you have thoughts, advice, observations on this? I'm seeking different ways to look at this problem, different approaches we might take. Open to anything, thanks in advance.

derStandard.at holds an interview with Novell's Miguel de Icaza, about their Mono and Moonlight emulations of Microsoft runtimes for Linux. Miguel also points out the convenient blindspots of those who argue against technology solely on the grounds of "It's not The Open Web":

I mean, how many people outside of the technology world really know about Linux at the moment? And even the Mozilla guys - the keynote we had here was done on a mac, every single Mozilla developer uses a Mac. And it's funny, they constantly attack Silverlight, they constantly attack Flash and then all of them use proprietary operating systems, they don't seem to have a problem doing it. And then they had the Guiness record thing for Firefox 3 and you went to the website and it had a flash map to show where people are downloading - so there definitely is a double standard here. And that's after all their claiming that you can do everything in AJAX - so they definitely don't 'walk the walk'."

If evangelists try to say that practical realworld web technologies can be tossed aside because of alleged philosophical impurity, then why aren't these proselytizers using some type of Linux box, instead of the super-secret tightly-controlled Apple hardware?

And it goes up a level too -- if you're really concerned about open use of the World Wide Web, and are against proprietary secrecy, then wouldn't you avoid accepting primary funding from Google, who has the biggest databases tracking consumer behavior on the Web, and who refuses to allow people to access the files Google holds on them? (If you're not up-to-speed in this area of cross-site tracking via third-party content, then try EFF, Wikipedia, or me.)

When your mortgage is ultimately paid by selling consumers' attention, it's a little disingenuous to throw rocks at others who just sell software.

We accept "proprietary hardware" and "proprietary OS", and run through "proprietary service providers" to bulk up "proprietary ad networks" and "proprietary social services", all to build "proprietary behavioral databases" for a sugardaddy, but dadgum we can't be using no "proprietary plugins", nosir (unless'n they're our "proprietary plugins" that is)!

It's like seeing a supermarket ad for "all natural ingredients"... nice enough at first listening, but just what does it mean? And if you met someone who insisted on eating only "all natural ingredients", but couldn't describe what they were, then that could get more than a little weird too.

I think it makes a lot more sense to just neutrally weigh the benefits and potential risks of various choices, and not to dismiss any choice out-of-hand for religious reasons. But if I were to argue that certain choices may not be tolerated, then I'd likely try to make for some reasonable consistency in that intolerant stance. Why feed Apple below and Google above, if you insist "Flash is subverting 'The Open Web'"...!?

The emphasis is on HTML development ("do not use tables", "do not use frames" etc), but lots of the recommendations are good for any runtime engine: strike a balance between similar experience across devices and using device-specific capabiloities... use emulators early but be sure to test on the varied devices themselves before release... minimize auto-refresh without audience disclosure and control... doublecheck contrast and color use under various viewing conditions... my favorite: "Use clear and simple language" (which implies acceptance of language-neutral imagery and appropriate animation).

There's a longer version available too, but it's good to keep the summary bookmarked, both for personal checking and as ammunition in internal workgroup discussions.