I have a bitter-sweet relationship with Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE). I think they build great technology. In fact, I've been a customer of their Dreamweaver product since 2000. It's an awesome offering -- and gets better and better.

Yet, when it comes to Adobe's upgrade policies, they often fall short -- at least for me. For example today they wanted to charge me full price for a product that I've bought and upgraded several times over the years.

Oh, well. End of my rant.

The fact remains that Adobe continues to innovate. Interestingly, the company has recently announced a variety of initiatives. For example, Adobe is sponsoring the SQLite database open source project (according to the company's open source thought-leader, Dave McAllister). The company also has new open source destination.

Oh, and Adobe has launched its eagerly awaited Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) software platform. No doubt, it's a big thing since it allows for rich web applications for the desktop (which relies heavily on Flash technology).

And yes, there are already some big-time users of AIR, such as EBay, Inc. (Nasdaq: EBAY), salesforce.com, inc. (NYSE: CRM), and FedEx Corporation (NYSE: FDX).

To get some perspective on this, I interviewed Tien Tzuo, who is veteran of web technologies and is the CEO of Zuora. According to him:

"At salesforce.com, we were one of the first enterprise software companies to champion the use of Flash, but primarily as a communication tool on our web site. Since then, Flash has come a long way -- especially with Flex -- and appears to be ready for prime time as a tool for developing data-entry intensive applications.

"The key benefits are: productivity, portability and offline-online capability. AIR is also a cool name, like my MacBook Air."

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The Complete M&A Handbook and The Edgar Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements. He also operates DealProfiles.com.