Sunday, September 24, 2006

Breaking news, three months on

It is perhaps a testament to information overload that we sometimes manage to miss news which is placed right before our eyes, often for several months. Om has a good piece on Adobe's aspirations in voice, wherein he apparently breaks the news that Henry Sinnreich is part of the picture. Except that I wrote this back in June:

"Henry Sinnreich has joined Adobe. Contemplate for a moment the number of desktops globally which support some version of Flash (think "all of them"), then consider the growing number of sites/communities built in Flash (YouTube for a start), and then think about how Adobe might want to capitalize on that valuable real estate position by incorporating voice, video and presence. Then be afraid, be very afraid."

Obviously, I picked up the news from the wonderful Richard Stastny, but I also had spoken with the project head at Adobe at Stockholm VON in May to get a view on where things were heading, which informed my subsequent post on the subject.

This is not a criticism of anyone, especially not my man Om. It just calls up some questions for me about our ability to absorb and retain information in an increasingly chaotic media landscape, and ultimately points to a lot of the same power laws of the old media world being reincarnated in Web 2.0.

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