[desktop-discuss] Adobe announces Acrobat Reader for Solaris x86 coming in 2009

[James Cornell]

Kaiwai Gardiner wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 15:09 -0500, James Cornell wrote:
>   
>> Kaiwai Gardiner wrote:
>>     
>>> On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 08:41 -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>>>   
>>>       
>>>> http://blogs.adobe.com/acroread/2008/05/adobe_reader_on_solaris_x86_co.html
>>>>
>>>>     
>>>>         
>>> Wow, that is pretty spooky; will we eventually see Flash 10 on Solaris?
>>> maybe Air and the Media Player?
>>>
>>> Matthew
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> desktop-discuss mailing list
>>> desktop-discuss at opensolaris.org
>>>   
>>>       
>> Probably not Air or Media Player, they haven't even got an alpha/beta 
>> out to Linux, pure vaporware at the moment.  I'm pretty sure given 
>> Adobe's bad track record they will gimp features in the Solaris version, 
>> just you watch!  How can we adopt Air, really?  It's not even up to par 
>> with Flash.
>>
>> James
>>     
>
> Hence the reason I think that Sun should work with Novell on Mono and
> Moonlight.
>
> It reminds me of what a person said on zdnet saying, "why should Adobe
> care about Solaris" - the question I ask in return is this; they always
> piss and moan about Microsoft, and yet, through their failure to support
> alternative platforms properly - they actually support Microsofts
> monopoly.
>
> Microsoft monopoly just didn't appear out of the blue, it was created by
> a concerted effort by the likes of Adobe to deliberately refuse to
> support alternative operating systems.
>
> Now, I wouldn't care - but having heard their piss and moan over
> Microsoft including PDF support with Office 2007 (but hasn't gone ahead
> because of that whinging by Adobe) - I personally hope that Microsoft
> does take Adobe to the cleaners with their expression package, to be
> completely frank.
>
> I mean, this is an example; imagine if Sun only provided Java for
> Microsoft Windows - then turned around whining about Microsofts
> monopoly; would anyone take Sun seriously?
>
> Matthew
>
>   
I look at operating systems as a tool, to get a job done.  It all 
depends on your industry and expectations, but in the end most people 
are at the end of the creek without a say.  Who's to blame exactly?  As 
you've said well, it's all the ISV's and Adobe's of the world.  I do not 
care about Microsoft's monopoly in the traditional "It's bad" sense, 
their company is huge and some of their products they really do try on.  
I certainly like competition and good products, but given poor support 
from Adobe, it might as well be tied at the hip to Windows, at least it 
works there.  Maybe they're strained with their 6,677 employees...

Their Mac versions are always less performant than Windows counterparts, 
and their update system is a joke, it's extremely painful even on the 
most robust hardware.  Their refusal to migrate to the Cocoa framework 
has left them in the dust for 64-bit support on Mac OS X, they had years 
to switch to XCode, and years to rewrite at least a few of their key 
applications in Cocoa, which would had been easy to migrate to be 64-bit 
compliant.  Funny since Macs seem to be pushing the whole 64-bit 
computing thing faster than Windows, since they offer a solution which 
is easier to support, Adobe just set Apple back a few years by making it 
a useless effort, the whole switch was mainly beneficial to Adobe as far 
as consumers go.  Carbon was not designed to be around this long, and 
they could have easily kept most of their internal code compatible, 
Objective-C is just a small layer, it supports regular C being embedded, 
you don't need to make it all fancy with IPC plumbing.  You need to only 
redo the interface, which is already designed, and make it into .nibs, 
an .xml-like interface format.  With all those employees they still say 
it won't be until CS5 before that will even be remotely possible.  The 
look for Linux and Solaris is grim given the above.

They have this untold love for reusing the same garbage for decades, 
it's no wonder they are too lazy and uncompromising even with their 3 
billion yearly revenue to make anything available with feature parity to 
even Macs, which at least have a confirmed user base, something for 
their idiot marketing staff to look at, it's something around 60 million 
units which is something to sneeze beachballs at, when the Linux user 
share is only confirmed for desktops at around 0.58%.  They may be 10-14 
million desktops, who knows, Sun can at least keep track of their 
installs, their download system makes it necessary, but it seems that 
Adobe doesn't care even though I'm sure Sun would be willing to give 
them the statistics.

I agree on Moonlight, at least from my experience with Silverlight on 
OSX it works and doesn't crash everything.  The main problem as it has 
been with both Microsoft and Adobe isn't with the client support 
exactly, it's their tools which establish the lock-in, see Flash and 
Acrobat, two very cross-platform technologies, see Air or Expression 
Design/Web/Blend all tied chiefly to Windows, as first class citizens.  
If any of those were available to other platforms they would be betas 
for a few years, and be extremely out of sync.

The only product from Microsoft outside of the Office department for OS 
X is Expression Media, an overpriced and gimped version of the Windows 
counterpart, which is only on Macs because modern creative studios have 
at least a few of them, and Digital Media Management is a niche, they 
took advantage of their market because there was nothing integrated like 
it on the Mac platform, probably because no body needs it, but Microsoft 
being Microsoft of course wasted effort in porting something touching it 
up to seem almost native, but still ugly, then slapped it in a box and 
yelled out loud like a gorilla in the room and said "Look what I have 
created!" and thus the whole building burns down because these two 
individuals are probably stuck on stupid.  Ending with a quote: "You 
can't fix stupid" - Ron White

James