I killed my morning listening to Adobe financial report published on December 14, 2006. What else can you do at 7AM on Saturday?
It proved what I wrote in my post a month ago. Adobe has great financial results, but Flex generated revenues were not there yet, which is fine for such a young tool as Flex 2. There is just one mentioning of the word Flex at the end of slide 17. Creative Suites products are fine. Acrobat is THE working horse. LiveCycle is the main bread winner in the enterprise sector. Flash Lite is doing great in mobile devices (phones and gaming).
If you listen to Q/A session (fast forward first three minutes if you are in a rush), it clearly states that Apollo is not expected to generate revenues in 2007. This is also understanable – Apollo has not been released yet. Flex was mentioned here as a path toward Apollo.
Twenty seventh minute into Q/A has yet another mentioning of Flex as a tool helping create Flash content.
The 30th minute – Apollo is for the future development leveraging development for existing formats such as PDF and SWF.
I do acknowledge the fact that Flex is a great tool, but as of today, Flex developers (myself included) are early adopters. We’ve gotten the Flex message a year earlier than the rest of the enterprise world. Stay put, improve your Flex skills, we are getting there. You’ll be able to monetize your skills in 2008.Big time.
Yakov Fain
Peter Elst said,
December 16, 2006 @ 9:59 am
I think this was to be expected — as I see it Flex 2 is now part of the Flash platform and making it free and open to developers will drive revenue for commercial products by Adobe taking this to the next level.
Looking at this financial report I think its import to see that Flex 2 is actually creating a lot of revenue at the moment, though not particularly for Adobe. Consultancy rates for Flex 2 projects have shot up and I for one have enough work offers coming in to cover 300% of my time.
This drive for Flex application development, and Apollo coming up some time in the new year will mark the Flash platform tools becoming a real source of revenue for Adobe. The best move they ever made is going free with the SDK — the market is creating itself before their very eyes and the demand for things like FDS (though I think they might need to tweak their pricing structure to accommodate a mid-size market) will only get bigger.
Bruce said,
December 16, 2006 @ 10:05 am
How were sales of ColdFusion? Any mention in the material you reviewed (thanks for saving me the time of reading through it all myself).
Yakov said,
December 16, 2006 @ 10:10 am
Bruce, good question…I didn’t pay special attention to CF, but I don’t think there were any specific mentioning of CF.
JesterXL said,
December 16, 2006 @ 11:47 am
7am!? HOLY COW!!!
Anyway, thanks for the summary.
Jamie Badman said,
December 16, 2006 @ 7:07 pm
Agreed with Peter – the work’s out there. Particularly, it seems, specifically for Flex Charting – this seems to really be capturing imaginations as far as I can make out. I’m totally sticking with Flex – something this good has to be worth staying with!
Campbell said,
December 16, 2006 @ 9:52 pm
Ha ha I have noticed alot of devs going to bed earlier and getting up earlier…..might try it and change my 3am bed time lol. Yakov, Things are already heating up!
Yakov said,
December 16, 2006 @ 10:41 pm
Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead
As to things that are heating up… I have enough work on my plate, but my thermometer is dice.com.
Jeff Houser said,
December 17, 2006 @ 1:31 am
I just want to add, that as best I can tell… the work is not out there for Flex in my geographic area.
For those that are busy, where are you located?
There seems to be a lot of interest. But, it is a cautious interest and people aren’t ready to commit money towards it yet.