If Adobe Made Cars…
Embracing Open-Source is one of the most significant advantages to Adobe in increasing the value of Flex. Open-source components are what make my Flex applications so much bigger and better than applications that I created in other languages. The built-in components made by Adobe are good too, but there is a major advantage to tapping into the development skills of the thousands of Flex developers who aren’t employed by Adobe.
Today, I read an interview with General Motors Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz regarding hybrid cars. Lutz says “One of the major challenges with the car is writing all the software codes for all of the zillions of possible interactions between driver, electric drive, battery, regeneration, when does the internal combustion engine come in, under what circumstances?”
As a Flex developer living lavishly in the Adobe world, I immediately related to this software development problem with this idea:
The solution is to open-source the software, and let me and people like me write the software for them. I know exactly what I would do if I had an API to my Honda Insight, and I would do it better than Honda has done it.
For example, I should have a button that I push before I know I’m am about to drive up a 2,000 foot hill. That button will indicate that I want to favor battery assistance, and don’t ever try to charge the battery unless I step on the brake. When I’m at the top of the hill, my battery will be very low. Then, as I drive back down the hill, there will be opportunity to recharge the battery. But if the battery is full at the top of the hill, then the kinetic energy from my descent will be wasted because it can’t be stored in the already-full battery.
Also, there are times in traffic where my driving actions cause the software to alternate between assist and charge every few seconds because I am slowing and going, even though I’m never braking. In this case, the software is doing more harm than good, and I would have better milage if I could unplug the electric motor completely.
I’ve had these ideas for years, and now I’m just waiting for somebody from a big auto manufacturer to come up with the same ideas so I can have what I want.
The point is that manufacturers should not try to supersede the intelligence of the software development community because then the advancement will be limited to what one single entity believes is a good idea. Sure, Lutz expressed good ideas like the OnStar integration, where the car knows if it is about to return to the home charging station and therefore it knows there’s no point in giving the battery a full charge. But for every one of those ideas, I’m sure the community has many more ideas that are just as good or better. And there’s no way for anybody to know what’s a good idea until experiments are tried. The best way to create a winning situation is to allow the community to experiment for themselves, at no cost to the manufacturer.
If Adobe made cars the way Adobe makes Flex, I wonder how customized we could really make them.
