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kberger

153 karma · joined January 25, 2011

http://about.me/kberger
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kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Another point to keep in mind is that our support of HTML5 and open standards crosses a variety of audiences. The folks who appreciate our contributions to jQuery and WebKit aren't usually the same ones who appreciate the easy visual design Muse offers. So while a given single product may not make sense for your workflow, the larger point is that we're strong supporters of HTML5 as a platform going forward. That support is being instantiated via a variety of tools, services, and frameworks suiting a variety of audiences.
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Unfortunately I don't have the detail on our technical roadmap to give this the answer it deserves. I'll see if I can get someone from the Flash team to address this...
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
http://www.quora.com/How-do-large-tech-companies-like-Google...
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
By the way, you can replay the official announcement and see live broadcast of tomorrow's keynote at the Adobe MAX conference here:

http://www.max.adobe.com/online/

kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Actually it wasn't contentious at all! Nitobi already had plans to donate to the Apache Foundation, and Adobe already had strong existing relationships with both organizations. We were glad to support that move to reinforce that we're here to support PhoneGap and further fuel its growth as a free open source project.
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Nitobi already announced preliminary pricing here: http://www.phonegap.com/2011/09/30/phonegap-build-moves-to-o...

We don't have anything else to announce right now.

kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
1- It really depends: on the urgency, on the size of the company, on the specific synergies. Big deals can be done quickly if we're confident enough in the high level rationale to figure out the details later. But sometimes the details really matter, even in very small deals. Sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes it's an ongoing relationship over multiple years.

2- For every deal we look at a variety of companies in the space, at least two or three, usually more.

kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
It really depends--every company is different and has a different set of dependencies between its employees. Both Typekit and Nitobi have amazing teams that we hope will be with Adobe for a long time.
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
I'm not the right person to speak to overall corporate strategy. For an overview of the context of the announcements today, I would watch the MAX keynote or check out the Creative Cloud product page:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html

kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Hard for me to say since I'm in product management--naturally my focus is on product.
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
It's exactly the properties that made them popular in the first place:

Typekit elegantly solves the licensing, technical, and user experience problems of serving rich typography on the web. That's something we've heard repeatedly is important to our customers, so we're excited to keep growing their business and investigate the right ways to integrate with Adobe applications.

PhoneGap makes it drop dead simple to develop native applications across devices using your existing HTML/JS development skills. As mobile devices continue to fragment and more and more companies need mobile apps deployed across platforms, this problem will only become more important to solve. We're excited to continue to contribute to the PhoneGap open source project, further develop the hosted PhoneGap Build product, and investigate what tool integration may make sense. We've already integrated PhoneGap with Dreamweaver in CS5.5.

So I would say these acquisitions are about talent, technology, and community. They are both amazing teams that have built great products with enthusiastic user bases--and it's important that they stay that way as they grow.

kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Adobe is strongly supportive of HTML5 and open standards. In fact, we've recently released two tools, Edge and Muse, that are built on HTML and related technologies. We intend to help Typekit continue to grow and continue to leverage open standards.
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
There's a variety of examples here: http://www.phonegap.com/apps

I'm also a fan of the Travelocity Android app, which was built with PhoneGap.

kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Well, the first thing to note is that Adobe has not and doesn't intend to acquire PhoneGap itself. PhoneGap is in the process of being contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, and will remain free and open source. That said, we're definitely interested in continuing to support PhoneGap's development via contributions from the Nitobi team. PhoneGap Build, the hosted service based on PhoneGap, will become part of Adobe. So part of the value is that service, but the key is simply enabling efficient, expressive design and development across devices, regardless of technology. We're excited to investigate what integrations will make sense, but right now it's too early to say.
kberger··on I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA
Obviously it really depends on the specific circumstances, but often it comes down to time, talent, and community. Sometimes the need is urgent, sometimes there's exceptional talent we'd love to join Adobe, and often there's a community that's not easily duplicable. I'd say all three played a role in these deals.