Once upon a time, Sun and Apple used to have about the same market cap. Today Apple has a market cap of $63BN while Sun's is just $17BN. Ahead of Sun, unbeknownst to many, is Adobe. Its market cap today is $18BN. For a company that in 1998 was worth "only" $1.7BN it has not been a bad 8 years!

My point is: Everything Changes. And in the world of Web development and design, and of the Internet technologies undergirding it all, it changes faster than most everywhere else.

Just 18 months ago no one had heard of "AJAX" or "Ajax," let alone of the OpenAjax Alliance, ajaxCFC, or LAJAX. No one had heard of Atlas and no one had heard of Apollo. Yet right now as you read this you are fully aware of all these A-words. Everything changes.

As you read this issue at MAX 2006, enjoying the late October sun in Las Vegas, stop and think a moment of how Web savvy Adobe has become in that same short 18-month period, and how mobile savvy it is about to prove itself in the next 18 months. Think about how much Google's role in the i-Technology Landscape has changed in the same period. Think about your own career goals, your own skill set. Has it changed as fast?

It is my firm belief that for developers and designers alike, from now on, keeping up with Adobe is going to be tough. If you are not yet familiar with Flash Lite, you ought to start tomorrow. If you didn't yet deploy Flash video on your clients' websites, ditto. If you are not yet experimenting with the Flash-PDF combo, why not?

With a greater reach than even Microsoft has, in terms of the number of devices -- more than 115 million Flash technology-enabled devices have now shipped worldwide -- Adobe is very much at what I call the "i-Technology sweet spot." In this issue the company's Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, unveils how the Apollo runtime will give developers a new paradigm that dramatically changes how applications can be created, deployed, and experienced.

Whether you are using Dreamweaver to build HTML or Ajax applications for the browser, you will be able to take that Web application to the desktop with Apollo. While everyone else is wrestling with how to get Rich Internet Applications working within the browser, Adobe is already taking RIAs outside the browser. The possibilities, once that happens, are virtually limitless.

As Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Narayen said in a phone interview last month, "We're seeing an explosion of digital content and we're poised to capitalize on that." The next version of the PDF reader, Adobe Acrobat, is due out in November. The third edition of Creative Suite, which packages Photoshop, Illustrator and other programs (and will be the first to run native on the new Intel-based Macs), is expected to ship in the first half of 2007.

The i-Technology stage, in short, is set. And Adobe is fully kitted out to stride out right into the very center of it. And stay there.

Don't take my word for it. Take instead the word of the high-caliber speakers at MAX, or of the top-notch writer-developers in this issue, including Kim Cavanaugh, Mansour Raad, Rob Rusher, Marco Casario, Rebaun Erickson, and Harris Reynolds.

Or take the word of Kevin Lynch, leader of Adobe's Apollo mission to create a new cross-OS, cross-device application runtime to extend the reach of Rich Internet Applications to the desktop. Because of Adobe, users will soon get a more compelling experience offline as well as online, with a rich media application that supports video, audio, HTML, Flash, and PDF. What's not to like?

Everything changes. With Adobe, it seems always to be for the best. Seize the day!