Results

The Adobe Industry Analyst Event we presented at yesterday in New York City was certainly an interesting experience. Finetune and Teknision joined with Adobe to provide a use case for Apollo that is the Finetune Desktop.

Martin Kay from Finetune spoke first, and walked the audience through the Finetune service and their business model. He explained how the Finetune Desktop provides value to both their end-users and the development team internally.

Martin did a great job giving the presentation and many questions from the floor started coming.

One question of note was around the concept of occasional connectivity, up the alley of:

“If all the music is streamed and I cannot use the application offline, what extra value does it have on the desktop?”.

We explained that the reason for Finetune to reside on the desktop is that it is the type of service that an end-user builds a passionate relationship with, and may potentially use throughout the day passively (listening to music).

The web browser is something that most users use actively (opening windows/tabs, closing them,etc) and when you deliver a passive experience into an active environment like the browser it is easy for the active actions to disrupt the passive ones by mistake. Having a desktop version of the application allows the disruption to be avoided.

Obviously we explained many of the features of the Finetune Desktop that take advantage of your local system, ITunes Artist playlists for example. We have many other desktop touch points planned, but as we all know, the Apollo feature set is not yet fully implemented.

These types of questions highlight the big problem that Apollo has been suffering from since the alpha launch on labs. The Apollo discussion across the industry right now is about technological capabilities and not about new types of engagement and user experience. Gabor Vida wrote about this in particular, and recently Mike Chambers has also begun leading conversations in this direction.

Gabor Vida then took over the presentation and introduced the crowd to our business model as a firm that develops Rich (Internet) Applications for evolving and established brands. He explained the concept of Branded Applications – applications that build brands by involving users through providing something useful, as opposed to interruptive marketing that is almost always dismissed.

The session ended with a lot of technical questions that I ended up handling. The majority of questions were from the perspective of the enterprise, and focused on issues like security, runtime deployment, and competition from Microsoft. I think I was able to satisfy the majority of questions asked, but again was bothered that the whole focus was just technology under the hood (it is still alpha…).

I left the session feeling as if the Finetune Desktop may not have been the best sample application for that crowd; it is something created for an audience that is quite different than the audiences of many of the analysts in the room. Finetune Desktop is a really great example of how Apollo can effectively extend a great web application to the desktop, but does not really provide a compelling reason for the enterprise to adopt Apollo as a platform to roll all of their applications out to.

I personally believe that the value of the Flex Framework to the enterprise is clear, and in time, enterprises that adopt Flex, will quickly see Apollo as a very manageable way to deliver desktop experiences without getting whole new teams of developers involved in any given project to meet this requirement.

Overall it was a good interactive session. Met some interesting industry people, and had some great conversations. I found James Governor from Red Monk particularly engaging. Had a great talk with him over beers about Adobe’s open source initiatives, and Microsoft’s new offerings vs. Adobe’s.

So regardless of anyone’s interpretation of Apollo, people are interested and talking. The next few months leading up to Apollo 1.0 will be very exciting.