Unfortunately I don't have the detail on our technical roadmap to give this the answer it deserves. I'll see if I can get someone from the Flash team to address this...
I have an email address in my profile if you (or anyone on the Flash team — Senocular, perhaps?) would like to take this conversation private. But I'm sure all the people up-voting my question would absolutely love an official, public answer.
And to clarify: I don't mean to imply that I think the Flash Player is going away. I'm just hopefully awaiting the day that my existing Flash-made content can run beautifully on the iPad and Win 8 Metro. Platform independence was the ideal that led me to choose Flash, and I'm excited about this ideal continuing into the future.
I just need to be sure that the processes I'm using today won't limit my options. My ever-growing library of resources — the result of a decade of hard work — depends on this.
Actually it wasn't contentious at all! Nitobi already had plans to donate to the Apache Foundation, and Adobe already had strong existing relationships with both organizations. We were glad to support that move to reinforce that we're here to support PhoneGap and further fuel its growth as a free open source project.
Can you point to anything in Adobe's history that would indicate it is a company that has any clue how to "fuel the growth" of a "free open source project"?
1- It really depends: on the urgency, on the size of the company, on the specific synergies. Big deals can be done quickly if we're confident enough in the high level rationale to figure out the details later. But sometimes the details really matter, even in very small deals. Sometimes only a few weeks, sometimes it's an ongoing relationship over multiple years.
2- For every deal we look at a variety of companies in the space, at least two or three, usually more.
It really depends--every company is different and has a different set of dependencies between its employees. Both Typekit and Nitobi have amazing teams that we hope will be with Adobe for a long time.
I'm not the right person to speak to overall corporate strategy. For an overview of the context of the announcements today, I would watch the MAX keynote or check out the Creative Cloud product page:
It's exactly the properties that made them popular in the first place:
Typekit elegantly solves the licensing, technical, and user experience problems of serving rich typography on the web. That's something we've heard repeatedly is important to our customers, so we're excited to keep growing their business and investigate the right ways to integrate with Adobe applications.
PhoneGap makes it drop dead simple to develop native applications across devices using your existing HTML/JS development skills. As mobile devices continue to fragment and more and more companies need mobile apps deployed across platforms, this problem will only become more important to solve. We're excited to continue to contribute to the PhoneGap open source project, further develop the hosted PhoneGap Build product, and investigate what tool integration may make sense. We've already integrated PhoneGap with Dreamweaver in CS5.5.
So I would say these acquisitions are about talent, technology, and community. They are both amazing teams that have built great products with enthusiastic user bases--and it's important that they stay that way as they grow.
