Adobe to cut 600 jobs

**Incrue** · 12-04-2008, 05:45 AM

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archive...company_w.html

Sign of the times... i wish they say how well flash is selling these days, or if this cut will affect some product

**tonypa** · 12-04-2008, 12:23 PM

I could understand that the post is still new but still found weird that it had 18 comments while the post about "Curly Braces: To Cuddle or Not?" had 87 comments. I so want to say it shows what people care about

**dVyper** · 12-04-2008, 03:40 PM

Thousands of people are losing their jobs all over the world. If this happened before the credit crunch it'd probably make more of an impact.

**tomsamson** · 12-04-2008, 11:18 PM

its always sad when people loose their jobs, but yeah, i agree, without the worldwide economic crisis and many companies laying off people there would be much more buzz around this news and way more people would have said:
see, cs4 isn´t selling as well as they´d like,maybe they should listen more to their users.

**Incrue** · 12-05-2008, 04:06 AM

Originally Posted by tonypa

while the post about "Curly Braces: To Cuddle or Not?" had 87 comments. I so want to say it shows what people care about

Thats amazing, so YOU dont care about that???The future of mankind depends on it!!

**renderhjs** · 12-05-2008, 07:01 AM

on a technical side adobe did great last year, but from a price point/ marketing it was very disappointing.

I think its good for once to let adobe bleed, hopefully it will once turn into acceptable EU prices. I surely am pissed off by them regarding area- barriers and ridiculously high prices.

**Incrue** · 12-06-2008, 05:59 AM

Off course part of that is because of the economy, what i dont belive is thats the only variable.Off course, adobe employers will disagree, they need something to blame to keep their jobs.Like Mike Chambers did in his blog ( bla bla bla "lower than expected sales of Adobe CS4 due to the economic situation")
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/200...obe/#more-1627
(to render) If you look at things like, for example, the GPU support they hype for flash, do you still belive they did great on the tech side?
Anyway, im curious about what will happen to Director now, it already was outsourced to india to cut costs even before the crisis.

**tonypa** · 12-06-2008, 10:27 AM

Somewhere the comment about poor CS4 sales was "CS3 is too good". It could be true, same problem MS has with Vista, the product you are trying to get people upgrading from is fine already and your new version is not that much better. For Flash, new F10 features like bones and simple 3D are nice but they are not that important.

Plus Adobe lost a lot of public trust when the hugely popular sites did not work anymore for millions of users with FP10, never again can they claim Flash Player is backward compatible. People will always remember this disaster and start to advise not to upgrade Flash because new version may not work properly anymore.

And lastly, I still believe the move from AS1 which was easy and simple and used mostly within Flash into AS3 and Flex has been confusing to lots of people and is still scaring off users who are not programmers. In these days when even Java is going for "simpler and easier to write" language, Actionscript is still moving in wrong way to become more powerful and more complicated. I am fully aware many people like AS3 and will continue to like it, still I am also sure it does require more effort and takes longer to understand compared with older AS which means the people who could develop for Flash may find other platforms more appealing.

These days its impossible to say "I know how to develop with Flash", you have to be specific which Actionscript version you know and which programming environment you know because you know well enough only one way. So the people creating swf files are now in different worlds, working with source files that cant be used by others who use different program and writing each piece of code 3 times to make sure it can be used by everyone.

**tomsamson** · 12-06-2008, 11:26 PM

i totally agree on all that tonypa said.
To add some more reasons:
As usual Adobe hyped up features that are pretty much not noticable at all in real life projects, like hey, we have gpu support now, well, from what i can tell so far the only use case where that´s noticable is for a bit sharper textures and hardware side upscaling in fullscreen mode (which itself has enough "security" limitations to be useless in many cases).

Then they also seem to focus on things which get the nice geek stuff bonus but are pretty much worthless besides that for 99.9% of the userbase.
How many people in the flash/flex developer userbase will code pixelbender stuff in custom C syntax? How many will convert C++ stuff using alchemy?

To me Adobe has really gotten totally out of touch with the majority of their userbase and what they want and how they work.
They seem to have exceptional difficulties to get the performance of the flash player on graphic handling side up due to them neglecting or beeing unable to propperly use the gpu for graphical operations and then try to offload that work as much as possible to flash content creators by trying to sell em the lie that one has to code in lower and lower level ways to get certain things going.
I believed in those things for a long while but then i tried some other stuff and noticed: hey, in unity3D one can code in javascript if one wants and get crazy things going which wouldn´t run on a highend machine of several years in the future if one did em in AS3 in flash.
Besides that with unity one can also combine using C# and JS script files inside the same project and it also runs at pretty much the same perfomance as its compiled down to the same code. That is as if one could use AS3 and AS1 script files inside the same project and both would run in the performance only possible with AS3 in flash.

Meanwhile such things made me turn from a flash hardcore user and evangelist (as Adobe would call it) to someone whos really disappointed with it and only uses it where it totally makes more sense for something and for everything else where its just too weak i use other technologies because i don´t believe in Adobe doing the right decissions to change that in a reasonabe timeframe anymore.

Tonypa also has a very good point in saying how much less easy to approach the whole move to AS3 makes flash. In flash 6 days i could tell anyone wanting to get into making interactive flashy content he should totally try out flash, even if hes got no programming experience he could get into it quickly. Now one could say that also lead to a flood of bad content, at the same time it also is the main reason for why flash became so popular and the plugin so widespread, so yeah, if they change that policy the plugin spreading percentage and userbase
count could go down a lot with time,too.

Meanwhile if someone wanting to make kickass interactive stuff i´d only suggest him using flash if he for sure is not interested in doing 3d stuff at all and also not intrested in doing any kind of stuff which is performance intensive in flash, otherwise i´d say hey,try unity, you can get ito it with basic scripting, get your prototype up and if you want to learn propper coding, it allows you to get into it in more easy way by not forcing you to do everything in C# right away, but just the parts you already feel comfortable with or where you see gain in doing things the C# (AS3/Java) way.

I also have to talk about this point of their security changes tonypa mentioned seperately because yeah, its really crazy what Adobe does there.
Security is very important of course and its a disaster for a plugin when its seen as unsecure but Adobe has a security approach which is a disaster,too.
They block functionality that exists with most other technologies and they reduce and limit existing functionality to the degree and in ways where it becomes a huge pain in the b to develop some things and makes certain things that should be totally easy to develop pretty much impossible.
The other day i was working on something that loads in sub swfs from another server and man, it cost me over two hours to get that going because due to the way Adobe changed things in flash player 9 and onwards you can´t do that anymore easily if the loaded in swf doesn´t have an allowDomain tag and even then when one loads in the swf it doesn´t return the right filesize so one can´t do a nice preloader and various other fun things like that.

Adobe really has to get its act togetherfor the next version and listen more to the majority of its userbase, next release they maybe can´t blame the economy or that the previous version was adopted so much that people see no need for upgrading again.

I feel quite sorry for those 600 loosing their jobs for such made up by Adobe spokesman reasons because to me its the top decission making guys who did wrong and lead to this result, not the people who follow orders and do the things.

**tomsamson** · 12-06-2008, 11:45 PM

and yeah, i also totally agree on what render said, its not nice to wish someone bad things but yeah, for Adobe cheating off people in the EU by asking twice the price for products i too wish em that they can´t sell em well until they decide to change that crazy policy.

**tomsamson** · 12-07-2008, 12:06 AM

also yeah, have to add one more thing cause it annoys me a lot: They do all those "great" security approaches which limit developers a lot and lead to lots of wasted dev time, at the same time the way they changed the player and garbage collector leads to memory leaks, problems in unloading swfs and any kind of display object really (yes, even if one propperly did everything to have em removed from ram) and makes lots of flash content a big ressource hog and prone to crash.
They should really stop to try to copy java and older languages to the degree where they also copy all bad sides.

Have a look at this: http://www.bytearray.org/?p=378
hooray, now in flash player 10 they added the great feature that one can again do timeline animation and in more cases rely on items removed from the timeline actually getting removed from ram!
awesome! they introduce such crazy bugs and limitations thanks to how flash player 9 handles such things and then its a feature if they bring the functionality partially back.

Its a similar story, not due to leading to memory leaks but due to having to do it in different way that makes it useless with nested movieclip animations:
You can´t access and control nested movieclips without reacting to an event now in as3 which gives you the security the content is now accessible (in all pre f9 versions you could just change the frame in the parent movieclip and access a child right away).
This makes using nested movieclips a pain and useless in most cases.

Now one can of course do things less with movieclips, use bitmapdata and code side sprite based stuff in many cases etc, but to me (and many others) such problems, such bugs and cutting of mandatory flash features makes the whole flash platform way less useful.

Because to me flash is useless for performance intensive things, for any 3d stuff that goes beyond spinning around a few things for some advertising crap and also for many 2D things due to the performance and other limitations, so the main key strength (where it was still way more useful than something like unity for example) was less performance intensive 2D stuff, especially creating and controlling timeline based graphical stuff and yeah, when they break that as they did i wonder more and more for every project if it makes any sense to use flash for it.

**dVyper** · 12-07-2008, 08:39 AM

You really need a blog to put all this stuff in...

**gludion** · 12-07-2008, 10:10 AM

Tomsanson, I totally agree.

**Wattz** · 12-07-2008, 11:52 AM

Most of these big companies will get rid of redundant managers and other positions that don't really "produce" anything. I'm positive that there are some redundant coders at adobe that are being let go, though. You also have to consider how many products they have and which ones are widely used and which aren't.

When I think Adobe I think of 3 major things: Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. All the rest are probably where the biggest cuts will be made.

**renderhjs** · 12-07-2008, 06:47 PM

Originally Posted by Wattz

When I think Adobe I think of 3 major things: Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. All the rest are probably where the biggest cuts will be made.

that was also my point when I wrote

Originally Posted by renderhjs

on a technical side adobe did great last year, but from a price point/ marketing it was very disappointing.

you guys reflect all on flash but adobe did a good job in general- pushing inDesign, Illustrator, AfterEffects and Photoshop for example.
Did you guys for example knew that with PS CS4 you can paint on 3d objects in projection mode - a dream of any 3d texture artist.
Or on another side that you can build you own interfaces in flash or a simpified AIR application for Photoshop?

But even for flash they did great steps,- some that come to my mind for example:
- 64bit support (linux for now)
- PS3 pushes (fullscreen support, FP9 port,...)
- FP 10 font rendering engine- with that you can finally write in almost any language with any rules you want.
- hydra base: its just a matter of time till the flash support of hydra will be supported on GPU cards just like PS and AE
- FP 10 type arrays improving just a bit more the performance

so all in all I think Adobe (not just flash but in total) did very well on a techincal side,- I just hope they would finally fix the error in the prices here- makes you look like a retard if you buy it at such conditions

**tomsamson** · 12-07-2008, 07:34 PM

I only talked about the flash side of things cause well, this is the flash games forum

Personally i think some feature additions in the CS4 package are nice but even all of them in total are not making it a worthy upgrade in my eyes, not even for half the price they ask for in the EU. I´d pay an upgrade fee of 300-500 max for the whole package, everything going way beyound that seems way overpriced to me regarding what´s delivered.

also: 64 bit support (only on linux and even there not in final form yet), seriously, how many people care about this? its nice to say: hey, yeah, we also care for the minority and yeah, we also make it future proof, all nice and good but first they should focus on getting it right what´s important now for the majority of users.

-PS3 pushes: this was way more Sony´s push than Adobe´s

-font rendering engine: hm, nice, still it can´t handle basic html textfields propperly
-hydra base: yeah, so we should now be happy about something that will work propperly in flash 11 or 12?
-typed arrays: ok, nothing worhty of making a big fuss about it though, its not as if it brings 10 fps, but yeah, we´re meanwhile used to struggling and fighting and beeing happy for every frame flash achieves more..

**The Helmsman** · 12-08-2008, 05:10 AM

Originally Posted by tonypa

Somewhere the comment about poor CS4 sales was "CS3 is too good". It could be true, same problem MS has with Vista, the product you are trying to get people upgrading from is fine already and your new version is not that much better. For Flash, new F10 features like bones and simple 3D are nice but they are not that important.

I couldn't agree with you mate when you make this statement. I think most of companies (that includes the company where I'm working now) waiting for bigger Flash player 10 penetration before they will go to buy new licenses.

As far as I know, most computers in the world still uses Flash player 9 and not 10.

Actually Flash 10 has more sweet and important features, people going to use in the near features. For example native right to left languages support for Hebrew and other right to left languages. Better HTML support inside Flash text area.

We just need to wait a little bit. I'm sure most of Flash developers here will jump to use version 10 in the next half year.

**tonypa** · 12-08-2008, 05:12 AM

Well, these improvements for Flash are all about Flash Player 10 which is free. Profit for Adobe comes from selling products like Flash CS4 or Flex, however you dont need to buy them to create F10 swfs, you can do it for free with SDK provided by Adobe. Now it is more of hassle to get it done so the money you spend on Flash CS4 is to "make things easier" and thats where Adobe completely fails. OK, you can easily draw simple shapes in Flash and make symbols and animate with keyframes but once you start to write Actionscript code you dont really benefit from Flash anymore - you can do same thing with free tools.

People who use Flash code editor do not use it because it is best possible tool to write Actionscript code, they use it because they have Flash anyway and it somewhat does the job. However, compared with free tools Flash does not provide any improvements so there is no real reason why people should buy it.

This is all caused by Adobe, for the last years they have drummed very hard about AS3 and how every respected developer must be using OOP and write their code using external classes. Only fools and idiots and stagnant developers not seeing the bright future of AS3 would use Flash and write code in timeline. So Adobe, the company who is trying to sell you Flash, is at same time spending lots of money and time telling you it is bad idea to use it. Its like car dealers writing books about how much better it is to use bicycles. What exactly is Adobe expecting when their message is "we want you to buy this pretty expensive product but we dont recommend it to be used"?

And I am sorry but I dont use any other Adobe products beside Flash so I am not able to comment those.

**The Helmsman** · 12-08-2008, 05:57 AM