Author: Nick Hodge

According to Fortune Magazine, Adobe is the 5th best place to work in the US: Adobe Systems No. 5

Camaraderie is the byword at this Silicon Valley stalwart known for its graphics products: frequent all-hands meetings, job rotations, Friday night beer bashes. Three-week paid sabbaticals every five years.

My comments: Adobe’s history has cemented a dichotomous industrial/company culture. It is a technology oriented company that has a strange mix of “sales orientation” (results are important) and “innovation culture” (smart engineers making cool products). Out here in the boonies (that is, not the US) we do not have beer bashes, cannot job rotate and hope to last 5 years to get that sabbatical! That said, it’s still a great place to work.

I posted the following on Thursday, 18 July 2002. In light of today’s announcements by Apple: Keynote, Safari etc its interesting to see that this is starting to come true.

Thursday, 18 July 2002: Something I remember thinking, if not saying, was that the whole NeXT heritage of easier software development tools was going to give Apple a significant competitive advantage with software. We are seeing a plethora of MacOS X based “digital hub” (or digital lifestyle) mini-applications tied to a web-services style backed (.mac) I am sure all of these, being MacOS X native, use the Cocoa (alias Yellow Box, alias NeXT frameworks) environment. The key to the volume of application production.

It is not surprising that Apple has “created” a new browser, it wants to control its own destiny. A browser should be a part of the operating system and are commodity applications. Created is an interesting comment, when in fact they have coopted some Open Source (Konqueror) HTML rendering code. Expect the browser component to be a part of the Cocoa framework, too. Developers will be able to place a robust HTML rendering element into their applications that is supported and maintained by Apple.

Whilst IE still has a bulk of the browser public (95% hitting this web site are from IE5 or greater), there is a fragmentation of the “last 5%” into micro-marketshare browsers such as Opera, Mozilla, Netscape and now Safari. Since the browser wars of the late 1990’s, there has been stagnation as far as browser innovation is concerned.