I buy stocks in companies that have products that I understand, and most of the time products that I actually use.  I tend to stay away from pharmaceutical, financial and retail stocks because I don’t understand those industries.  Technology is what I know and what I invest in.

In December I bought Adobe (ADBE) in anticipation of their upcoming Apollo release.  A lot of people are expecting Apollo to be as game-changing to the Desktop, as Web 2.0/Ajax technologies were to the web.

Apollo will be a widely installed operating-system neutral runtime environment, which will run Flash and Java-script applications outside of the browser.  It will allow these applications to do what they already do well inside of a browser and make REST/SOAP calls to a server and redraw aspects of the GUI – all that Ajax-style stuff.  In addition to just running apps outside of the browser, Apollo adds the ability for applications to:

USE LOCAL FILE STORAGE
– provide offline access by storing code locally
– improve speed and offline access by caching large amounts of data
– open/save local files

HOOK INTO THE OPERATING SYSTEM
– system tray notifications
– background processes
– drag & drop
– virtually anything that a desktop app can do which a broswer app can’t do

TechCrunch this morning, did a great job of introducing why Adobe Apollo is so important.  And Ryan Stuart has some other articles about the project, which I encourage you to read:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=127
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=227
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=234

Apollo is going to be a huge step forward towards my Desktop 2015 vision.  If Apollo does takes off as I expect, a thin OS will become practical.  Imagine your OS launching an Apollo desktop, rather than gnome, kde or explorer.exe.