In Adobe demos Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool (via Daring Fireball) John Nack writes:

Are you surprised? Don’t be. As I’ve written many times, Adobe lives or dies by its ability to help customers solve real problems. That means putting pragmatism ahead of ideology.

Yes, I am surprised. I am surprised despite what Mr Nack writes. Or rather, I am surprised because I have a different view of who Adobe considers its customers and believe that companies are nearly incapable of putting pragmatism ahead of ideology, which in the world of business more often goes by the term strategy.

Ever since the development of PDF, Adobe has seemed more interested in creating vertically-integrated, cross-media corporate publishing solutions, not the finest tools for craftspeople creating visual assets—or whatever it is that designers do. I have a book right here, Beyond Paper: The Official Guide to Adobe Acrobat, by Patrick Ames with a foreward by John Warnock, which I picked up back in 1993. The back cover copy is worth a read:

Beyond Paper introduces Adobe Systems' new technology, the Adobe Acrobat family of software products. With Acrobat software, computer users can exchange documents with other computer users regardless of hardware platforms, operating systems, or application software. The same document can now be shared, viewed, printed, and stored by users with completely different computer systems.

Neither a manual or a technical treatise, Beyond Paper paints a colorful overview of the features of Adobe Acrobat software by comparing the way you work today with how you might work tomorrow. Written for computer users of all levels, Beyond Paper is the necessary guidebook to understanding the key components of Adobe Acrobat technology and how it can work for you on a daily basis.

Beyond Paper details Adobe's plans for world domination, pre-web, using the Acrobat stack of products and technologies, which included Illustrator, FrameMaker, Photoshop, and of course Postscript. Adobe acquired Macromedia (Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion), in order to create an analogous stack of web-centric technologies to complement the print-centric Acrobat stack.

There's nothing wrong with any of this, but see what's going on here: Adobe has been more interested in selling enterprises on stacks of technologies than selling craftspeople tools for quite a while. I am the only individual that I know that owns a copy of Create Suite—CS4, since I find little compelling in CS5—that I actually paid for. Everyone else is using pirated copies, subsidized education versions, or—in most cases—copies of the software provided by their employers.

The people who write the check for Adobe products are not the primary users of those products. Who are Adobe's customers? The purchasers or the users? The dudes in Dockers and polo shirts or the dudes and dudettes in ripped jeans and t-shirts from Threadless?

(Apropos of absolutely nothing, let me point out that a far larger fraction of Apple's users buy their own gear.)

I want to say that Adobe doesn't really care about you, dear Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign user, but that's not really true. They do care about you. But I think they see meeting your needs as instrumental to doing what they really want to do, which is wedge themselves into every nook and cranny of a large organization. You're their beachhead. You're their entrée into the enterprise.

This is why I fundamentally trust Apple more. Not because they're a group of better human beings, but because their goal is to make money selling stuff to people who use the stuff that they buy. People who have an emotional and practical attachment to it. Because it works for them.

Back around 2003 or so, before Blackberry became a mainstream thing, I looked into getting one. I never did, because it was basically an anti-human technology. Well, not so much against humanity as oblivious to humanity. RIM didn't care about taking care of normal people with POP3 or IMAP mail servers: they cared about selling CTOs on the ease with which their Exchange servers could talk to a Blackberry. I don't blame them, but on the other hand I had no illusions that they cared about me.

Let's assume Adobe does release a compiler that renders Flash using an alphabet soup of open-ish web technologies: That would provide some evidence that they do indeed care about helping their users do what they want to. But I believe that the structure of Adobe's business provides a constant pressure that resists this sort of behavior. And that's why I've been shopping for a new illustration tool for the last three years or so, one built by a company that wants to win my money by making something that I love enough to pay for.