Shebanation

I almost feel bad piling on, given how poor a reception the Zune is getting in the press: first CNN does their story on Zune which ends with the anchor and the reporter enthusing over how much cooler the anchor's new iPod Shuffle is, then all the guff Microsoft is getting because the new Zune isn't compatible with Windows Vista yet.

But my primary purpose in writing this isn't to pile on, but to point out how difficult it is for developers to make their software compatible with Vista in a timely manner. Adobe just released Acrobat 8 a few weeks ago, and it too isn't compatible with Vista or Office 2007. This isn't because we don't care about those platforms: rather, it shows how sometimes software release schedules make compatibility difficult. We could have delayed the Acrobat launch by a few months to wait for Vista and Office 2007 to go final, then do all of our testing and so forth, but doing so would have been risky. We didn't really have any way of knowing that Vista and Office would really hit their RTM dates, and every day you delay shipping costs your company revenue. So it goes.

That probably won't stop others from pointing at this lack of support as proof of incompetence or nefarious intent, though. (I'm actually surprised no one has accused the Zune team of omitting Vista incompatibility on purpose yet.)

Posted by Andrew Shebanow at 01:06 PM | Permalink

I'm going to use this blog as a place to discuss a variety of issues. I'll probably spend a fair amount of time discussing Microsoft - my job here at Adobe is to watch what competitors do from a technical point of view and keep people inside the company up to date on the ramifications, and Microsoft is the competitor I spend most of my time on. I should point out that discussing Microsoft as a competitor doesn't mean that I think everything they do is inherently bad or immoral - I also spend a fair amount of my time educating Adobe employees about Microsoft technologies and about the benefits to Adobe of leveraging those technologies in our products. It seems like opening that conversation to the world beyond Adobe could be useful - I get the benefit of other people's comments, and hopefully others see the benefit in the things that I have to say.

That said, I also plan on discussing other technologies and business issues I'm passionate about, including:

• Dynamic languages - I'm a big Ruby fan, and am very interested in efforts to make dynamic languages like Ruby work on top of runtime environments like the Java VM, .NET, and Adobe's recently open-sourced Tamarin engine.
• Collaboration - before I came to Adobe, I spent 7 years working at PlaceWare and then Microsoft on the product that eventually became known as Live Meeting. I still believe that the potential of real time collaboration is huge and mostly untapped.
• User Interface Design - although I've done plenty of server-side programming over the years, I'm a client guy at heart. For better or worse, a lot of the user interface design of the Live Meeting client is my work - when PlaceWare was a startup it was difficult to keep UI designers on staff for financial reasons and thus I took on a lot of the design work myself, with help from Product Marketing folks, graphic designers, and many others.
• Open Document Formats - although I think open source is incredibly important, I'm personally more interested in making sure all the content everyone creates is reusable and repurposeable. To that end, I don't care for proprietary, undocumented file formats (and yes, I do know that Adobe has a few of those - this is just my personal opinion).
• Dynamic Media and RIAs -Like collaboration, I think the combination of video and animation with user interface content is an area that is ripe for innovation. Flash, Flex, and Apollo are leading the charge, and Microsoft is trying to join the party with WPF and WPF/E.

There will undoubtedly be other topics that come up over time. If there is anything you would like me to talk about, please comment on this entry or send me an email: my email is shebanow, and the domain is adobe.com.

Oh yes - the title of the blog. Once upon a time, I worked at Apple. I had a pretty acid tongue back then, and as a result earned the nickname of "The Shebanator". The blog title is a play on that nickname, but I don't plan on being quite so mean here - depending on your point of view, time has either smoothed out my rough edges or worn me down.

Posted by Andrew Shebanow at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)