Adobe Taking A Page From Microsoft

In a move reminiscent of Microsoft, Adobe Corporation made a claim yesterday about the market penetration of its products. The claims are possibly true, just as Microsoft’s claims generally could be, however, in both cases, all that glitters, on the surface, is not gold underneath.

Yesterday at a conference in Japan, Adobe announced it has received an independent assessment of the worldwide installed base for its Web platforms. A Millward Brown survey estimates that Flash has been installed on 99% of the world’s Internet-enabled PCs, leading Adobe to estimate that Flash Player 10 by itself will break the 80% penetration mark by the end of Q2 2009.

Some 100 million PCs are believed to have successfully installed Adobe’s AIR runtime platform — and by “successfully,” the company means, it’s running and active and without trouble. That’s based on the company’s own statistics about downloads.

from Betanews

While I can say I account for 2 of those downloads, that doesn’t mean that AIR is running on my machines - it is not. The first time it happened is when Adobe snuck it by me with the Adobe 9 Reader update, which I wasn’t paying close attention to. I only became suspicious when I looked at the directory size, and saw that over 200 MB was being used. I investigated the bloat, and discovered the AIR install by stealth. The second time was when my son updated a machine of mine. After my warnings to him, it won’t happen again.

What does this mean?

Just as with Microsoft and its possible, yet improbable claims for market penetration, lies are not explicitly being told. Yet anyone not born yesterday knows that the claims can’t truly be valid, for just as many users who reverted their machines from Vista to Windows XP, many others, wishing for less bloat, and irked by the stealthing of the AIR platform on their machines, removed it. (Not to mention the backlash this probably caused, with Adobe Reader 9 removed from a certain number of machines, replaced by a lighter, less invasive program like Foxit.)

article on Betanews

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