Adobe is making some moves. Two acquisitions were announced recently – PhoneGap and Typekit. It’s about the users, differentiation on top of standards, cloud and relevance.
PhoneGap is an open-source, Web-app framework and packaging/publishing solution, and possibly soon an Apache OSF submission.
Typekit is a typography company with some big-name customers among its claimed 250,000 (The New York Times). They offer a subscription service for system-independent fonts that Web app and site creators can leverage via JavaScript.
Just a few years ago, the Flash versus HTML5 wars waged. If you remember this, you remember the outcome – essentially the winner was HTML5, not Flash. The outcome is the result of Google, MSFT, Adobe themselves, and most everyone else going to HTML5. Now we have Adobe making some moves to add more standards-relevance to its tools and embracing recently released CSS properties and HTML5. How quickly things change in our dynamic mobile market. Air? Flex? Are they enough? We have our answer.
This set of acquisitions adds more momentum to the tool development for creating differentiated HTML5/JavaScript/CSS Web apps with great UI and UX for B2C and B2E customers. Adobe also has a cloud offering – Creative Cloud – to augment their products and foster a community of designers. I see both of these acquisitions fitting into this strategy to extend Creative Cloud. They needed a packaging and cloud publishing mechanism – PhoneGap provides that. The recently approved CSS2 property for font-family definitions of preferred fonts is what Typekit specialized in – remotely hosted fonts that are not tied to the host system’s OS or tool. Another toolset extension. Another edge for Adobe – they’ve been in the font business…forever.
Adobe needs to turn this ship around. With abundant cash in the bank, perhaps a content management acquisition is not far away?
Tags: Adobe, Apps, Dan Zeck, Enterprise Mobility, Flash, HTML5, JavaScript, Mobile, Mobile Mastery, Mobile Web, PhoneGap
