There is some real commonality between our goals, though, if I read your comments correctly. In my view, the goal of a brand is to deliver value that customers can use. “Brand value” can be everything from utilitarian to creative to social to transformational in how it grows the customer. The more social and expressive power available to a brand (as with Adobe’s new stuff) the more a brand can free customers from current constraints. (Customers with more freedoms are better customers.)

As I see it, being cross-platform makes the Flash video player more “social” than one locked to a single OS. This is definitely a plus.

Are Adobe’s offerings the final answer? Not by any means. Theoretically, brands would be better off if there was a real standardization and openness of video formats, in ways you describe, so that distribution, use and sharing of videos could be maximized. That’s because the essence of brands is not control from the top but customer engagement and innovation from below, where that freedom can be used to deepen the brand and extend it into new contexts. Silos don’t grow brands; network effects do.

Adobe does seem to be moving slowly toward more open frameworks. As you point out, this is one way they can differentiate themselves from Microsoft. As Microsoft brings out more closed technologies that directly target Adobe, Adobe may begin to move faster—but with a plan that doesn’t undercut its core markets. Adobe also competes with OpenLaszlo, which is a powerful open source competitor to Flash. There is probably some push/pull going on.

The following is a small illustration of my point:
“Video over the Internet: Adobe Flash Player video (it powers YouTube)”
YouTube is great at a couple things: free bandwidth and embedding videos in web pages. On the other hand, bandwidth is cheap now, and people want to actually *use* videos, not just watch them in a web page. They want to save them, download them, blow them up full screen, podcast them, put them on their iPods, burn them to DVD, share them with a friend, play them on the TV, add them to presentations, and play standard video in any player – and it’s just not happening. Is Flash even capable of these uses?

Many of us act like video on the internet has finally *arrived.* It hasn’t. For context, I was sitting at work in London watching a local TV channel being broadcast from Toronto – live – with YouTube-or-better quality over 64kbps ISDN (narrowband) in 1997. A decade ago. When the internet was about to reach 1.0.

Similarly tragic, with Mpeg4 the new ISO standard for everything – HD DVDs, 3G phones, digital TV, the internet – and with a specially designed, platform *and*player* agnostic version of Mpeg4 (.mp4) for the internet – to free users from maintaining a proprietary player for each proprietary format – video on the internet is in a much worse state than it was in 1996.

And that’s without considering the spread of DRM, which restricts internet video to users with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 and Microsoft’s media player. It’s tough to know whether to laugh or cry – although I would advise against slapping a brand on *that.*

On the whole, we seem to want to simultaneously empower and disempower people; engage and disengage with them; treat them as valued customers and criminals; as partners and the enemy; someone to cherish and beat the crap out of. Such is love (with a psychotic).

(Note: it appears Microsoft in particular is driving Flash adoption with their refusal to support .mp4 which it views as a competitor. Thus, Flash is the most sensible alternative. I expect Web 3.0 will bear a striking resemblance to the Ludivigo technique.)