How Adobe can stop Microsoft: Attack with a Linux initiative

Adobe will blow the chance.

MS may be our favorite whipping boy, but this is a case where the MS presence is a good thing.

Unless, of course, you want a web that belongs to flash. I don't know that I want to see a lot of Silverlight (or Moonlight) out there, but holding Adobe's feet to the fire can only be a good thin.

Quoting: ... can only be a good thin.

Ah, dino why is dieting the only thing on your mind lately?

Bdy Txt.

Can't imagine why they would want to "stop" one of their biggest revenue streams. Having a native port of the Creative Suite would be a good thing... but certainly not as a ploy to throw rotten fruit at Microsoft.

EDIT: Although, isn't it interesting to see Dvorak write something like this? I'd expect him more to write articles that read 'Die, Linux, die!" than this.

Poor Dvorak. Back in the bad old days when I worked at ZDNet he was given the mandate of being the resident curmudgeon. It's awfully hard to sustain the curmudgeon schtick day in and day out- I give him credit for stamina. Several of their tech "personalities" had their own characters to play, and a good part of the time they didn't even write their own columns, but used uncredited staff writers.

Quoting:Unless, of course, you want a web that belongs to flash. I don't know that I want to see a lot of Silverlight (or Moonlight) out there, but holding Adobe's feet to the fire can only be a good thin[g].

The problem isn't Flash, or Silverlight, or animated GIF's, or BLINK tags. The problem is that characteristic which is common to all four: animation without user events.

Consider YouTube. I go to the main page, search for Paul Hunt, and I find and click a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO_BnsrWMnI I am not annoyed; I am rather entertained. Sure, it's Flash, but I watch because I expected interactive content.

Contrast this to Shoot the Monkey banner ads. I go to Google, enter "linux kernel patches". I load a bulletin board page, and at the top is a Shoot the Monkey ad. What's the first thing I do? I scroll down (if I can) so that the ad is off-screen. I wasn't expecting interactive content; I was researching kernel patches. My first reaction is to remove distractions from my visual field; lather, rinse, repeat, and pretty soon Shoot the Monkey is annoying beyond belief. My next step is to black-hole the DNS lookup that serves every Shoot the Monkey ad I encounter.

Does that make sense?

Yes, HTML has its place, which is most of the Web. But poor HTML/CSS design, at the hands of the ignorant, can be just as evil as Shoot the Monkey.

gus3 I agree. The only reason I use adblock is because I cannot stand all the animated ads all over the place. If I go to a site that has animated ads I will block all the ads on the site, but if they don't blink and flash and be all annoying, I leave them there. I also find it annoying when ads cover 2/3 or so of the screen with like a 5 word wide paragraph in the middle of the page for an article, spread over 10 pages.

Do people really click on these ads to make advertisers think they are useful?

Quoting:Do people really click on these ads to make advertisers think they are useful?

My guess is that the sites get paid per ad view, so more pages in article = more ads "viewed" = more money for site owner.

And yes, I agree too. Flashy Ads are the reason I run adblock as well. They waste screen space and bandwidth and are more often then not just plain annoying.

The blower upper of cars,

Try FlashBlock. Once you see all those "f"s you will never click or see another flash on most pages*. Having no idea what is beneath those buttons makes one reluctant to look.

Txt.

P.S. Are you a Hollywood type working on action movies? If so, like flash - less is more than enough!

* Unfortunately, the NYT seems to have learned an end run, most other sites that I tend to visit it remains effective. If I remember correctly, the ad content flows from the same domain as the news, block one you lose the other.

If Adobe wants to 'stop' Microsoft, the only way of really getting there is using open standards instead of the zillion closed proprietary standards they use right now, and selling their products cheaper. That means stopping Microsoft equals stopping their profit. Not gonna happen. Duh!

Otherwise Flash would have been Free Software already - included / pre-installed in Opera and Firefox - today. Instead, Adobe and Microsoft both face the same problems - a demand for openness which puts pressure on their revenue - and both use the same tactics to deal with this problems; being vendor lock-in using their platforms and formats, and - especially in the case of MS, Intellectual Property to defend their Intellectual Monopoly.