A number of European startups - and many others globally - will be thrown into chaos today with the news that Adobe is discontinuing development of its Flashpaper product.
Adobe will continue to sell and support the current FlashPaper 2 version, but won’t be updating the technology to support Microsoft Windows Vista and IE7, which will make it virtually worthless.
The news will hit US sites like Scribd and Docstoc, and European sites like the UK’s edocr and Germany’s Twidox which only recently won funding. edocr currently bases all its document sharing on Flashpaper.
Twidox CEO Nicholas MacGowan von Holstein contacted TechCrunch UK today to say the move would have a major impact: “What about all the websites that have been storing all their documents with Flashpaper? It will be a major job having to transfer all those documents to a new solution.”
04 September 2008
I Don't Want to Say We Told You so...
...but we told you so. If you use proprietary programs and proprietary formats, this is what happens:
If business schools are smart, they will start teaching these 'case studies' on why it's bad business to invest your company's data in proprietary formats, and to a lesser extent, some commercial software, such as MS Office. When time is money, conversion time (if this is even an option with the two Adobe formats!) is costly.
ReplyDeleteFor example, if I were a startup, I would buy a Google Premium/business account for my business and use Google Docs and ODF as my primary tools. Or even Zoho Office. You could even work offline with an OpenOffice or a wide variety of other office apps that support ODF.
Unfortunately for them, fortunately for us, the case studies just keep building up. Soon, you will have to be *very* stupid not to realise why this kind of thing is so foolish.
ReplyDelete