Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Looking at Adobe's history, back in the 1990s they started promoting Acrobat, giving it away for free, and in the process soundly trouncing the effort by WordPerfect to introduce a similar product. (Anyone else remember that one?)
Once they had control of the market, they started making regular changes to Acrobat, then created the separate "Full version" of Acrobat (which you had to pay for). Many of the changes they made were good, from a customer's point of view... but others just made Acrobat bloated, and shifted its focus from a cross-platform, unalterable document reader to a partially- editable word-processing/forms/graphics app.
In the meantime, Adobe has bought up a lot of its competition, and is forcing customers to shift to their (very expensive) apps.
Adobe makes great products... but they've also proven that they can be as ruthless as Microsoft in protecting their market. Very likely, they'll try to find ways to add proprietary (or just highly optimized to DE) elements to ePub, molding it into their preferred image, in such a way as to lock everyone into their version of ePub on their devices. (Microsoft also works this way... see "Browser Wars".) This will make DE the popular app to run ePub files on, with their extra elements. Adding DE to Creative Suite will further enlarge its user base with creative types who are already using Adobe's software (which is most of them, now that they own the graphics market).
They will likely also apply the draconian DRM systems presently used for major Adobe products to lock down DE to 1-2 computers max. This could extend to material you add to DE, but hopefully they'll stop before they get there.
However, if they decide to put DRM on their ePub docs, there'll be no stopping them, and no use arguing about it.
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Adobe make their money from content production tools. And one of the key things they need to be able to say to content providers is that with their tools you can create the media asset once and then it can be read on many different devices, so content producers don't have to mess around repurposing content. So they have a built in incentive to ensure that their content can be read by mobipocket readers etc. It's not in their interest to have browser war.
Does that mean that further down the line they won't introduce features that aren't additional to the standard. Maybe. But the history of the 'browser wars' was that both Netscape and Mozilla introduced extra features some of which were later incorporated into the standards. The problem mainly with the way that Microsoft sought to leverage its dominance in the OS market to kill off Netscape, and its poor support for standards, rather than with additional features.
Will Adobe introduce DRM? It must be a certainty that DE will read content using a DRM system that only DE can read. But it will be interesting to see whether Adobe decides it wants to actually operate that system or whether it simply opts to be the platform for systems operated by content providers.
And Adobe's licensing policies aren't draconian at all. The last time I looked at their licence it said I could install on as many computers as I wanted providing I only have one copy running at a time. Seems pretty reasonable to me. And certainly more customer-friendly than other companies.