We’ve all heard the stories about how Toyota is having problems with everything right now, and have even paused production of many of their top-selling models while they sort out the problem (and presumably so they don’t have to go back and fix a load of cars they just built, as well as not producing a load of cars that nobody will buy because of perceived problems).
But in a recent article, The Register (UK IT News with a light-hearted slant, and one of my favourite sites) were reporting on the latest ‘news’ from the world of Adobe, about a serious security flaw in the Adobe Download Manager. They made the comment that this problem and others in recent times “have made Adobe the Toyota of the software industry”.
Initially, this made me laugh, but only because it is so true!
Some of their software (in this case Flash player) is so poorly written that Apple have publicly stated that it’s not going near the iPhone or iPad.
Adobe themselves have said that when Windows Phone 7 (the new Windows Mobile – which looks very interesting) is released at the end of this year, there will not be a Flash player for it. To me, that’s another nail in the coffin for Flash, because the longer people have to live life without it, the more they will realise that they can live without it – and if it IS buggy and chews the life out of their mobile devices’ batteries, they will be happy to continue to live without it even after it is released.
As a software engineer of many years now, when I see a company such as Adobe saying that they cannot produce a version of the player they refer to as ‘ubiquitous’, for a new platform that has been announced now and will be available more than six months from now – that says to me one of two things: Either the code base for said player stinks to high heaven, and even small tweaks involve refactoring thousands of lines of rancid code, or their software team has no idea how it works and daren’t commit to having a working version half a year from now. Remember that the whole Flash ‘platform’ was bought wholesale from Macromedia a few years back – did they not audit their source code before buying it?
Adobe used to have a reputation for excellent software. Remember Postscript? Photoshop? Premiere? All groundbreaking in their day.
Once Toyota have sorted out their problems, their brand will have been damaged and the jokes will continue for a while – but I expect them to bounce back, since they have always had a reputation for quality and reliability.
Adobe? Not so sure.
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New blog post – What on Earth is up with Adobe? http://tr.im/OPyz