Making Sense of the Madness (Adobe)

So, I'm trying to write a quick and non FUD post about the recent Adobe news on Flex and Flash. I'm going to say a few things here, and everyone knows I'm an Adobe fanboy, but this stuff hit pretty hard and Adobe is not taking steps behind the scenes to clear up the confusion so the rumor mill is flying. Many peers and friends are now stuck in the lurch trying to figure out what is happening to their careers and the platform they spent years building. Primarily, what do we tell our clients that we worked hard selling these technologies as recently as last week. Here is what Adobe needs to address:

1. Adobe did a terrible job working with and through the community that serves them well. They have abandoned the roadmap and have made us look inept. This needs to be addressed. A new roadmap needs to be released ASAP. Let everyone know you have a plan for the next few years and GET THE COMMUNITY BEHIND IT.
2. Adobe needs to address our concerns with HTML5. They abandoned a great technology (Flex) for a technology that doesn't even have a spec defined yet. They may not have abandoned Flex at all, but man are they doing a shitty job saying that. Just let us know the plan for transition and what timeframe it happens in.
3. What is happening with ColdFusion? We need to hear that the budget and plan has not been changed. SHOW THE ROADMAP!
4. What's going on with AIR and mobile? Flex was the 'go to' for us to build cross platform apps. HTML5 makes great web sites. How about native apps. Don't tell me I HAVE to use PhoneGap. My hope is that I will still be using ActionScript to write AIR apps, but who knows! Adobe needs to let us know.

Mainly, Adobe needs to stand up and work on some succinct messaging and we need to see the 1, 2, and 5 year plans. Adobe can do whatever they want. That's fine, they need to do what they need to do to make $$. What is unacceptable is the poor messaging, divergence from their community focus and lack of response to the current mess they have made with their poor release of information. Hopefully when the dust settles, we will see this:

1. Spoon takes care of Flex, and it doesn't turn into the mess that was the CFML Advisory Board debacle.
2. Clients embrace Flex post Adobe, just like they embrace jQuery, Drupal and other OSS projects.
3. Adobe continues to support AIR mobile apps written in ActionScript.
4. Adobe continues to support Flash Builder with Flex, or opensources what exists.
5. ColdFusion doesn't disappear into the darkness next week ;)
6. LiveCycle goes through a 4th retooling and minimizes it reach and focus to core concepts. Adobe also retools the pricing structure to reflect this change.
7. DRM and DAM becomes a focus with easy tools (outside of LiveCycle) that allow us to work them right into our production workflow.