Adobe MAX 2009 shows a back-to-basics approach

Adobe is making a big splash about its acquisition of Omniture

The MAX 2009 conference this week shows why Adobe is still one of the major names in Silicon Valley. The company is very good at what it does, it knows who its friends are and it thinks small.

On the graphics front, Adobe showed off some amazing technology for its core image formats. Designers will be salivating at some of the new photo and video editing advances, and developers will be happy with the changes to Air and Cold Fusion.

But the company was really making a big deal about its takeover of Omniture. The data harvesting firm looks to be key to Adobe's plan to extract revenue from the digital content it produces.

Now that the merger has gone ahead, Adobe can finally attach a value to hard data, a language that its customers can use for business intelligence. If it gets the merger right, and Omniture solves its own lingering technical issues, it could be a very profitable union.

However, it's not all about the money, according to Dave McAllister, Adobe's director of standards and open source. McAllister took the role in order to open source some areas of Adobe's technology, since he saw it as a fertile ground for the developer community and has a basic support for the concept.

But this does not mean that everything is up for grabs. "I'm an open source enthusiast," he said. "But I want to eat and send my children to college too."

Formats like PDF are no longer in Adobe's hands, McAllister said, as they are now international standards for which Adobe will build ancillary developments. While he would not be drawn on plans to open source the key Flash application, McAllister stressed that Adobe will not work with companies that broke open-source contracts.

Flash was another key theme of this week's conference. Adobe has benefited enormously from the growth in online video, which it sought to solidify this week with the forthcoming Flash 10.1 upgrade.

Flash has around three-quarters of the online video market, and a 94 per cent upgrade rate, and is at the cutting - and profitable - edge of software development. But the company has recognised what some in the industry have not: the mass-market desktop PC is a dying platform.

Adobe has always been fairly inoculated from this, since it's not possible to do desktop publishing on a smartphone, and the firm will always have a hand in the workstation market. It has built a successful niche among the creative industry and other vertical sectors, but these markets are small, although widespread among many companies.

So Adobe has proclaimed that it is all about mobile devices and new platforms, and that's key to Flash's future.

Smartphones and cloud services will give Adobe an important handhold in rapidly growing markets that will suffer less than most in the years ahead. This is a long-term move which the company obviously thinks will succeed, especially since it sees rapid advances in mobile GPU capabilities and memory optimisation.

The company has concluded agreements to embed Flash with all major smartphone manufacturers except one: Apple.

Apple's iPhone is the last smartphone to resist. Yes, Adobe has managed to get Flash applications accepted by Apple's Apps Store but that doesn't mean we'll be seeing embedded Flash on the iPhone for as long as Apple wants to keep it a closed platform.

Apple and Adobe go back a long way, so you'd expect exceptions to be made. This is made even more apparent by the Omniture merger, since that company also collects data on the iPhone user base.

Adobe has never had pretensions to be a huge corporation like Microsoft, IBM or Apple. Instead, it has achieved steady success by being the best at what it does and navigating the shark-ridden waters of global finance. The past week has shown that the hands on the tiller are steady.