Adobe and its P2P Ambitions: It's About F*cking Time
Om Malik riffs on Adobe's purchase of amicma, and suggests some new aspirations for the Flash technology giant:
[from Adobe and its P2P Ambitions]In pursuit of this strategy, the company has acquired amicima, a privately held start-up founded in 2004 to “develop improved Internet protocols for client-server and peer-to-peer networking, and to develop new applications based on these protocols.” After being tipped off by one of our readers, we were able to confirm with our sources that Adobe has bought out this tiny company, which can help Adobe achieve its VoIP and P2P ambitions. An Adobe spokesperson declined to comment.
Amicima’s publicly available product is amiciPhone2, a p2p-based VoIP client that combines presence, text messaging and file transfers with voice chat. In addition, Adobe recently announced a partnership with VeriSign, which is now in the CDN business. Together, expect a lot of Flash and P2P going forward, perhaps making it a lot easier to move rich content around the Internet.
Well, it's about f*cking time.
Considering that Flash is installed on 99% of the Internet-connected PCs in the world, I am baffled as to why they never rolled out a instant messaging network. I raised the question in many meetings with vairous product teams at Adobe, and generally got the answer "we don't want to make that sort of money."
Incredibly dumb. Meanwhile, AOL, MSN and Yahoo, and now Google, have been growing their networks.
Although, with Flash technology, I don't know why it has to be P2P. I had long expected Adobe to buy Userplane, recently scooped by AOL, because that technology is based on Adobe's Flash server.
May be too little too late, although embedded IM in a next generation of Flash could upset the balance pretty quickly.
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