Monday, October 21, 2002

Bruce Chizen spoke at the Churchill Club last week, along with John Warnock and Chuck Geshke. I think the moderator could have done a better job. Basically, based on Chuck's metaphor, the room settled on talking about which ducks Adobe has hit and which ducks it is currently aiming for. One of the current ducks in Adobe's sights is photo management. Bruce has been talking up their forthcoming photo management solution for a while now, but something tells me they're not going to tackle the really tough "photo shoebox" problems. Version one will be a "me too" product to iPhoto (much to their chagrin) that may (or may not) handle thousands of photos. What it WON'T do is help me automatically tag each photo with important bits of information, like who and where. Perhaps by version 3 they'll figure it out. And since iPhoto will always be a Mac-only product, Adobe might be able to lock up this OEM market. The other duck that Adobe is gunning for is data transportability, or using PDF as a container for multiple media. I don't quite get it from a marketing standpoint... Why will I wrap my photos in PDF? How will a PDF slideshow work? When you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, I suppose. All in all, a hohum event. I did get a chance to talk with one of the attornies that represents Adobe (we sat at the same table). He is directly involved with the Russian programmer debacle. We touched on a number of issues before the main presentation: DMCA, Eldred v. Ashcroft, the legality of reverse engineering to recover ideas (since ideas aren't protectable, only expressions of ideas), etc... All this blog reading paid off! 5:12:44 PM

My PowerBook returned today (YEAH!) and I'm feverishly working thru my inbox and backlog of news. 3:21:32 PM