Yesterday Adobe announced a new service called “Shibuya“. It’s “a monetization service for developers creating AIR applications”. This may sound familiar to anyone who knows Sharify – the service that I launched back in February which “allows you to easily monitize your Adobe® AIR™ application by turning it into a shareware application”.
My thoughts about this echo very closely those of Grant Skinner in his recent post “Thoughts on Adobe Squiggly & Developer Relations“. In one way I am glad that Adobe are stepping up to the plate and providing what I believe (from my own experiences and from the interest in Sharify) is a very useful and necessary service. But in another way I’m concerned that Adobe are competing with the very people they should be trying to empower – the users of their products.
A little history
As mentioned, Sharify was launched in February of this year under the name of shAIR. It received a fair amount of immediate attention – some of it from people inside Adobe and specifically from Robert Christensen, a senior product manager on Adobe AIR:
I wanted to write you a note and let you know that I’m excited about the shAIR framework that you are working on. Application monetization is a critically important area for AIR developers and I suspect quite a few developers will be leveraging your shAIR once you make it available
The only problem was that he felt that our choice of name infringed on the Abode AIR trademark so he asked if we would mind changing it. He acknowledged that this would involve some work for us and offered in exchange to support the launch of the renamed shAIR with blog posts and articles on the Adobe Developer Connection website. This wasn’t the first time Adobe had come down hard on people for using AIR in a domain name – it happened to freshairapps (see discussion here and here). AIRApps.net had an even worse experience wasting $15,000 sponsorship money for an Adobe MAX conference (as described by Edward Mansouri).
We considered our options carefully. Though we believed our choice of name didn’t infringe Adobe’s copyright (or at the very most it was a gray area) it was more important for us to maintain a good relationship with Adobe. Their offer to help with the promotion of our product was worth much more than the hassle of re-branding our (still very young) product. We made the necessary changes and I emailed Rob the news to be greeted by absolute silence. Previously he was replying to my emails within a day of receiving them. Now it took over 6 weeks and a few reminder emails until I got a response – the not very verbose “Confirming receipt of your email”!
My cynical side started to think that perhaps all Rob was interested in was getting me to change the name of the service. The promised help certainly never materialised. Maybe I should have been more proactive in chasing Adobe to promote Sharify but I opted to focus on improving my product. I was a little disheartened by the change in attitude but decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and assumed I could rely on their marketing support once Sharify was out of beta.
And then… Shibuya!
I’ve given the history just to make it clear that there were definitely people at relevant positions within Adobe who are were aware of the Sharify service (in addition to Rob I have also received correspondence from the Senior Product Manager on the Adobe AIR marketplace). It would seem to be at the very least polite to have contacted me before the announcement of Shibuya and told me that Adobe were working on something extremely similar. Instead, the first I heard was when somebody emailed me a link to an article on The Register.
As Grant notes in his post, it is not simply the case that somebody is competing with my product that upsets me. Sharify already has a competitor called Nitro LM which serves a similar purpose, though it is targeted at a different market (“the enterprise”). It is the fact that the competing company is the same company who is responsible for the platform that I am developing on.
I spent time creating a product which enhances Adobe’s platform and enables developers to make money using the platform. I imagine this leading to more developers spending their time creating AIR apps (as there is a potential payback) which would lead to more installs of the runtime which is presumably Adobe’s ultimate aim. By developing and releasing Shibuya Adobe are rendering the time I spent doing that to a large extent wasted. Which doesn’t encourage me to spend time building things to improve the ecosystem around Adobe’s products. It should also be a warning to other developers who are considering this, which can only damage the very ecosystem that Adobe should be trying to protect.
Another problem with Adobe deciding to tackle this problem is that they have the ability to make changes to the runtime itself. It is unclear from the Shibuya announcement whether this has happened in this case but I have logged feature requests with the AIR team for functionality which would have made Sharify more secure and easier to implement. I don’t know if Shibuya uses any features from an as yet unreleased runtime but if so it would seem that Adobe are not only competing with the people they should be helping but are competing with an unfair advantage!
The future
So – is this the end for Sharify? No! Not yet at least. Shibuya is not available yet and doesn’t have a release date that I can find. It seems that once available it will only allow purchasing from within the USA and Canada. And it appears to be tied in to one payment method (using the PayByCash payment provider) while Sharify allows developers to handle payment in any manner they choose. It is also unclear from the prerelease site if Adobe will charge for using Shibuya and if so, how much. And if Adobe have added features to the AIR runtime to help with the development of Shibuya then presumably these features will be available to other developers as well in which case we will be able leverage them to improve the security of Sharify.
However, until we know more about the final form of Shibuya it is hard justify spending additional development time on Sharify. We are committed to ensuring it continues to work for the members of the private beta who are currently using it but there are some exciting improvements in the pipeline which will have to be put on hold until we establish whether implementation would be a waste of time. We will also have to very carefully consider any other projects which might enhance the Flash Platform.
13 Comments, Comment or Ping
Hi Kelvin,
A colleague of mine forwarded your post and I wanted to respond to a few of your concerns.
1. I do want to apologize for not contacting you before the release of Shibuya on Labs. This was by no means intentional and I can understand your frustration. For what it's worth, I am genuinely sorry that I did not meet your expectations.
2. As you know, I have been presenting on the topic of application monetization for quite some time beginning with Adobe MAX in Milan last year. See: http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2008/12/monetizing_applications_with_a.html - I stand behind everything I have said to you and many others before: monetization of applications is a critical need for developers. I believe that the more choices a developer has for selling their applications, the better for developers. Some platforms for building and deploying applications prevent third parties from building a monetization service at all. With AIR today, developers are using services like PayPal and Amazon Flexible Payment Services to sell their applications. In the next year, my hope is that we will see more players in this space providing a wide array of options from PayPal to Amazon to Shibuya and Sharify.
3. As stated to you in emails before, I want to figure out ways to promote Sharify once you launched. When you are out of a private beta, please drop me an email. The last email I have from you is from 5/17 in which you thanked me for adding you to the AIR 2 prerelease. If you sent other messages after that, I did not receive them.
Sincerely,
Rob Christensen
Product Manager, Adobe AIR
October 8th, 2009
Two things:
1. I would very much like to be part of the beta!
2. Keep at it! I want to see sharify prosper!
I have investigated your competitors and I'd much rather use Sharify than Nitro-LM (expensive, upfront, corporate) or Shibuya (nebulous, closed). You are the plucky underdog and I'd very much like to see you succeed.
There is definitely room in this market for competition.
Thanks for all your work,
Jeff Printy
October 11th, 2009
Jeff we have never heard of you... Your comment of "Nitro-LM (expensive, upfront and corporate)..." -- so NOT true and is a completely subjective opinion. So, I don't think you have not seriously considered/discussed/evaluated Nitro-LM as a solution for your application(s) to espouse such a position.
Sharify and Nitro-LM completely in a different "Class" of solution, with much different capabilities.
Sharify is obviously designed for smaller applications, specific to Adobe AIR with a simple transaction component. We see it adding value for the sub-$50 application market (weekend programmers and individuals and only in Adobe AIR looking to monetize some of their ideas and efforts - kudos to Kelvin for recognizing this market!).
Nitro-LM on the other hand is designed more for control, understanding and optimization of your product sales for applications. Nitro-LM started out in C/C++, Java and .NET -- only added Adobe Flex/AIR within the past 2-3 years (we also recognized the need).
Nitro-LM is typically used for commercial applications where it's features and capabilities are designed to help the company drive revenue by introspection of customer behaviors while providing maximum code protection (e.g. encryption) and dynamic licensing. It's features are more attractive to companies who already have sales/marketing/support infrastructure, or individuals who are looking for -more- than what Sharify provides.
Either way - it is nice to have options in the market place. Unfortunately, the Adobe Shibuya project appears to be an example of what can happen when your partner recognizes the 'value' in what you are trying to do and decides to try and run faster that you can.
Dave Bigelow, President
Simplified Logic, Inc. / nitrolm.com
October 12th, 2009
Hi Rob,
Thanks for the reply - I'll address your points below:
1. Thanks for the apology. My main complaint in this entire issue is that didn't let me know you were working on something which would obviously a major impact on my product even though you were fully aware of Sharify and were claiming that you supported me with the development of it. I still find it very hard to understand how it could have slipped your to mention Shibuya to me - presumably you have been working on it for a while and you must have been aware that the release of an Adobe backed competitor would have a large effect on my plans for Sharify.
2. I know that the idea of having a way to monetize AIR applications isn't of itself new or revolutionary. Although you have given examples of payment providers rather than services which allow AIR applications to validate installs, licenses etc. Paypal, Amazon, Google Checkout, etc are all payment providers. All they can do is take the money from a customer and inform a developer's server that they transaction has completed. Sharify, Nitro LM and (now) Shibuya provide a mechanism within to check for licenses and allow/ deny access to an application based responses from the licensing servers.
3. Thanks for your continued offer of help when we come out of private beta. As I mentioned in the post, I didn't continue emailing you as I felt fairly disillusioned by the change in tone of your emails from the point where we changed our name. I will of course be in touch when we reach a point where we are coming out of public beta although I fear that Adobe might now see a conflict of interest in promoting Sharify when you have your own product which serves the same purpose.
As a short term demonstration of your support I would love to know more about exactly how Shibuya works and the business plan behind it. For example, are you planning on charging developers to use Shibuya? If so then how much? I see that quite a few apps on the Abobe AIR marketplace are already using Shibuya so it appears to definitely be out in the wild and in the hands of a few developers already. I'm also interested in how secure Shibuya is and if it uses any new or undocumented features of the AIR runtime.
Thanks again for your reply,
Kelvin.
October 16th, 2009
Hi David,
I agree with you that Sharify and Nitro-LM serve different segments of the market and that there is plenty of space for them to co-exist. I have looked into Nitro-LM before and it seems to be a well built and robust solution. One thing that I wasn't clear on even after reading through your material is how much it costs for the developer to include. It seems like the licenses are rented from your company and need to be renewed every year?
I'd also like to clarify that the latest version of Sharify includes encryption for code protection. I'm interested in whether you guys had any notice from Adobe that they were developing Shibuya?
Thanks,
Kelvin.
October 16th, 2009
Kevin,
Nothing from our end from a notice standpoint regarding Shibuya - just noticed it by accident. (God works in mysterious ways) :) Adobe did take notice of our solution about 2 years ago and we have a good working relationship with them.
Nitro-LM has several levels of capability and service level:
- 'Lite' Versions for unlimited usages with encryption support,
- Standard for licensing and encryption,
- Enterprise for the whole enchilada!
Nitro-LM is designed for customer's who 'actually' are trying to make money. While it can be used by and for anyone, we are providing a 'service', something that needs to be paid for (typically annually).
This assumes that the Customer's Product(s) that we are licensing/protecting is -ALSO- providing value, and that our Customers have an expectation for some type of recurring revenue (e.g. upgrades, maintenance, SaaS, etc.).
The 'hip' trend of creating/running Micro-ISV's (i.e. congratulations you created and own a 'job') that place emphasis on a ONE-TIME purchase with FREE upgrades for life are probably -NOT- a good relationship with us...
Why? Because their OWN business model works AGAINST themselves!
Specifically, they will eventually saturate their customer base and not be able to generate more revenue to keep the lights on in order to react to demands from existing customers for 'new' features that they have obligated themselves to provide - 'forever'... It does not matter how many customers are obtained or in what timeframe; more customers means a bigger support cost down the road - the business model just does -not- work in the medium/long run. The feeling of accomplishment is short lived, and the opportunities that are missed are significant.
Hope that makes sense. There are so many screwed up ways people/companies are conducting their business it is hard for us to identify the 'perfect' customer - but if the customer fundamentally is designed to produce a 'recurring' revenue, we will probably have a great relationship. If they are designed to self-destruct, we will advise alternatives (things to consider any why), but in the end will be happy to sit back and watch the destruction. After all, everyone loves to watch 'implosions'... :)
Dave
October 16th, 2009
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the detailed reply and the further information on Nitro LM!
I can definitely see the market for apps/ services protected by Nitro LM and I think that what you say makes a lot of sense in that marketplace. I would definitely recommend companies building a large, complex applications which ARE their product to check it out.
On the other hand, I think that there is a large market for apps which are simpler and cheaper and sold for a one off fee (as seen by the massive success of applications in Apple's App Store). And I feel that the advantage of AIR is that it empowers lots of developers trained in the ways of the web to create exactly these simple yet desirable applications.
Basically I feel that Nitro LM and Sharify serve completely different markets. It just remains to be seen where Shibuya fits into all of this - hopefully all three solutions can co-exist but we shall have to see...
Kelvin.
October 16th, 2009
Kelvin (sorry been slamming your spelling all along), :(
We are in fundamental agreement on all of this.
On a related note (and this could be a blog entry on it's own) - I think that until Flex/AIR are able to be held up as something other than a perception of "Flash" it will be hard to go beyond a perceived value of FREE 'entertainment' or low cost 'do-dad' application. "Flash" does not cast an impression of 'mission critical' or 'essential' for customers/end-users on a regular basis.
I think Adobe 'stepped on their own' with that decision to standardize on the name of 'Flash Platform'. That forces us to fight the 'snickers' in the Enterprise when they hear "Flash". This is an unfortunate knowledge gap that has been deepened within the enterprise in my own opinion that will prolong commercial acceptance of Flex/AIR applications - and keep prices and perceived values LOW....
So only time will tell - true value should have a price. If an Application is is needed, customers will not have a problem paying for it, or re-paying for it over time. If it is nothing more than a passively used 'widget' or screen decoration, that is a different story/purpose/existence.
Cheers!
Dave
October 16th, 2009
@Kelvin
1. Thank you for responding back and accepting my apology.
2. Again, please let me know when you come out of beta.
3. I apologize if the "tone of my emails" seemed short. Looking back at our conversation, I believe the only email that appeared short was the last one and that was because I was responding from my phone and, to be honest, did not have anything more to add at the time.
4. With regard to your points around Shibuya, I will relay your feedback to the team as your request is quite reasonable. So you know, in my role, I am focused on the lower level API's that make up the AIR runtime.
October 18th, 2009
I thought that Adobe was "cooler" than this.
I feel a little heart broken.
What of other words like actionscript?
Are they going to make actionscript.org change their name?
They just made Flashden change, but the other, not so popular, places have been left alone as of now.
What's up with all of these name games?
Doesn't it help Adobe that others want to use and enhance their platform?
Take a C++ developer for instance, say one day that developer stumbles upon Flashden (Activeden) or Sharify and sees that they can make money using the Flash platform; they are probably going to have to eventually buy an Adobe product if they want to seriously develop for the platform.
So, why does Adobe have any beef with sites that direct people to their own products?
Really seems counter intuitive.
In 2002 I fell in complete love with the Flash platform and in '06 I thought the Adobe take over was a very good thing.. but what's happened to Kelvin seems a bit shady to me.
The Adobe community only gets hurt by these kinds of things, "A house divided by itself cannot stand."
October 22nd, 2009
@TAD: Flashden sells ready-made files that allow clients to use (or even create) Flash files without purchasing Adobe Flash IDE which potentially lowers the sales of the software.
October 31st, 2009
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