Why is Adobe attempting to resurrect Director?

Director 11 is on the scene, and I can’t help but wonder why? Why waste time on Director when we have copious amounts of really amazing 3D toolsets for Flash, many of which are nearing maturity to the point where supporting them would make more sense. Some of these people are doing truly amazing things, throw them a bone Adobe! Hardware acceleration already works with Flash through browsers, its worked with Projectors for a long time. If I were Adobe I would pull a page out of Google’s book and hire the creators of Papervision3D and tell them their full time job is to continue to move the platform forward. For web based things, Director is dead. The latest version of the runtime is stuck at 50% in the US. HALF of all people don’t even have Shockwave installed. Why should they? Very little is done on Shockwave. And whats up with all the runtime environments anyways? Flash, AIR, Acrobat and Director? How about rolling some of the key abilities of director into Flash, which is already installed everywhere? For local things, just focus on AIR and hardware acceleration.

In short, I think Adobe should discontinue Director and focus on Flash and AIR. Shockwave in its very nature conflicts with the goals of both Flash and AIR, and is yet another runtime that must be installed on people’s machines. Before Director 11 there hadn’t been an update for years, nobody was doing new Shockwave content online. I think Adobe should hire the creators of Papervision and tell them to further the platform, integrate the Flash player more with Papervision, focus on integrating hardware acceleration and graphics library support into AIR, oh… and let Shockwave stay dead.