(2003-03-27) Canter Macromedia Central

Marc Canter flames the pre-announced Macromedia Central system for offline Flash Rich Client apps. When we - Macro Mind (Jamie Fenton and I) decided to give away the VideoWorks player - back in 1984 - we made a crucial decision to not charge for that player. I can't tell you how many arguments we had - with John Doerr and the Macro Mind board - about that. "Give away something for free!" They were flabbergasted! Well what that meant was that MacroMedia (the descendent of our original efforts) would never participate in any of the money being made off of their tools. This has haunted them for years and Macromedia Central is their answer to it. Now they're going to charge a measily 20% for establishing this new kind of distribution system and building in some sort of DRM - charging mechanism - into this system. This means that standard Flash RIAs can now be sold within a standard system - condoned (and profited from) by Macromedia.