I watched your two M&A announcements today with keen interest, because I've been watching the overall market change and we're kind of trying to figure out where Adobe fits into things. Where we used to use flash, we're using HTML5 for web and mobile, and where we used to use Adobe SMS, we're now using brightcove, kaltura, and others. We're phonegap hackers as well.
I'm trying to figure out if Adobe is more interested in building supporting tools, or if Adobe is trying to build more of a "one stop" platform a la brightcove appcloud and what people have built out in various verticals for different toolsets (heroku for rails, brightcove for video, pantheon for drupal, etc). As you look forward from the M&A strategy, how do you see the technical solutions coming to market? Are you guys trying to do a rollup, or augmentative strategy? I'm only asking because a lot of recent technical offerings have been out of tune with out Open Source stack approach, and while I'd love to work more with Adobe products, it's been really hard to figure out how and where you guys fit into the new Open Source / Cloud / SAAS / Mobile / HTML5 & CSS3 landscape.
It's obvious you guys are trying to get in front of the trends, but I just can't figure out what that actually is going to look like six months from now.
Any insight there into the overall strategy? I know you might not be able to answer it, but I'd love to know.
My company — workhabit — has been building the same services for Drupal (which is one of the major platforms we do). We have a full iOS SDK we call DiOS (Drupal iOS), which basically allows you to plug Drupal as data services into any iOS application.
We're going to be adding some white label applications and "officially" releasing it later in November with a new site launch (as well as an Android followup), but it's definitely another approach to this. We wanted to do something to connect the HUGE open source system Drupal to the colossal iOS and Android markets, and after a few months work, here it is.
To the original poster, I think it's a good idea. There are a lot of competitors out there, and there is a lot of momentum in the space to connect up mobile apps and web to things. I would definitely test-market and see if there is interest. Personally, I think your idea may have merit — there is a giant demand for data services on phones, and anything that makes it easier would be great. I would encourage you to look at models where you could drop the "whole kit and kaboodle" because I think data services are going to commoditize extremely quickly.