Monday, October 29, 2007

Adobe: Empowering the Future Generation

You know, I get a lot of email and regular mail complaining about Adobe's "high" prices for software. And I understand. Basically. So, every once in a while I'll have someone complain about how we're not helping the next generation learn this stuff due to our prices.

You know, over the past few days, I've taken a look at that area. And you know what? You people who have told me this are 100% correct. So Adobe took a major step about a week ago (sorry for the late entry) in announcing that it is preparing to give Flex Builder (the SDK of which, Flex, is open source) away to students and faculty. All they have to do is prove who they are with the general yada yada.

If you're wondering why we didn't pick Photoshop or Dreamweaver, here's why. Adobe is betting its future on rich Internet applications and AIR, which we encourage are built in Flex rather than in Flash (though Flex is just merely a branch of the Flash overall platform). If we're going after the future generation, why not give them the future tools?

Oh, and also, this gives us an edge over Microsoft. Like they'd ever give anything away. You know kids -- "Oooh! Adobe gave us expensive software for free! We love you Adobe! We don't want Adobe to go away, so we don't like Microsoft." Maybe a bit too deep, but the idea is there at least.

According to this InfoWorld story, it'll be on our website next month (which is, like, two days away).

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