It’s stunning to see how much companies manage to upset people using their technology by not replying to questions. One of the best examples in the RIA space right now is Adobe’s communication around the Flash FP-40 bug. Flash is a nice technology, but why is it so difficult for the company to talk to the community. FP-40 was reported in early April 2008, and it’s a very annoying bug. And still no-one from Adobe can tell us when that bug is going to fixed!
One of the advantages of open source is, that you can fix bugs in the software products you want to use. While Adobe started open sourcing some technologies in the past, the Flash Player still is a proprietary piece of software. With the tough RIA competition from Microsoft Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX Adobe will be under a lot of pressure within a relatively short period of time. I can already see the prices for the Flash tools tumble.
Undere these circumstances it’s even harder to understand why the Flash community doesn’t get any good information on when such an annoying bug as FP-40 will be fixed. Sure, it wasn’t only Adobe’s Flash Player causing the problem, but is it so difficult to talk to the Firefox community and try to find out what it takes to fix a bug like that? Adobe already has a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation for the Tamarin Project, it shouldn’t be difficult to get some experts from the Firefox team to help with the bug, even if Adobe has to pay for that. After the Firefox side of the problem was fixed with the release of Firefox 3.1, Charles Liss of Adobe is working on a fix now – which should be available with the next release. Thanks, Charles, for taking on this issue – and well all hope that there will be a quick solution to the problem. I’m not blaming you, but maybe some people in higher positions at Adobe think about how such a no-communication strategy backfires for them. Is Adobe under so much pressure already that you can’t afford to answer simple questions? ;-)
Maybe you should reconsider your open source strategy for your Flash product line: you might get quicker fixes for your bugs in Flash Player if most of the code – which can be open sourced – would be open sourced. Actually I don’t believe that’s going to happen, but maybe the idea makes some people think. There are valuable development resources in the community very willing to assist the Flash team. After all, Flash is a cool technology!
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I agree with you.
someone should fix this stupid bug.
Adobe should be ashamed of itself!
of late, I have been working on Flash and Flex technologies and looking at their source code that they recently opened as well as the frameworks (Cairngorm) that they support, I am getting a sense that Adobe lacks good architecture and coding skills. Hopefully, with Silver light coming into picture, let us expect Adobe to stop jerking us around.
In windows OS input works fine.
Therefore, there may be a collusion with microsoft
:)
@The: I suspect that politics play a role in fixing this bug, but of course that’s just a feeling.
@Code2glory: Good point, I’m glad to see the competition in the RIA market as well. I believe that companies like Microsoft and Sun have much more experience in building languages, frameworks and good software architecture than either Macromedia or Adobe. The behavior Adobe shows here is definitely going to damage their credibility within the software development world.