In a development that only Scrooge and the Grinch would find amusing, the tech industry has entered into a fevered period of pre-holiday job cuts. In the last few weeks, there have been layoff announcements from Adobe (ADBE) (680 jobs), Electronic Arts (ERTS) (1,500 jobs), Sprint (S) (up to 2,500 jobs), Microsoft (MSFT) (800 jobs), RealNetworks (RNWK) (70 jobs), AOL (100 jobs), Sun Microsystems (JAVA) (3,000 jobs), Blue Coat (BCSI) (roughly 150 jobs), Lexmark (LXK) (825 jobs) and Nokia Siemens (NOK) (potentially north of of 5,000 jobs).

Applied Materials (AMAT) could be next.

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Suddenly, it’s mating season in the tech sector. Xerox (XRX) is paying $6.4 billion for a piece of the cloud, Adobe (ADBE) is hooking up with Omniture (OMTR) and Intuit (INTU) with Mint, and that may just be the start. As Om pointed out, this is good news for startups and entrepreneurs, especially those with money tied up in late-stage investments that aren’t likely to go public soon.

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In a lengthy filing with the SEC, Omniture (OMTR) provides a detailed time-line of the events that culminated in its agreement to be acquired by Adobe Systems (ADBE) for $21.50 a share. There are several fascinating aspects to the company’s account.

For starters, the deal came together in a hurry. On July 20, Adobe told Omniture it was interested in pursuing a transaction, and that it wanted to announce the deal on September 15, the day it was scheduled to report earnings. And that is actually how it played out.

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On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.

The push to promote cloud computing is part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for federal I.T. in the process.

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A group of 10 tech-industry executives spent Tuesday and Wednesday lobbying members of Congress and the Obama administration on issues like taxes, immigration reform, and software piracy.

The group, which included Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, Adobe (ADBE) CEO Shantanu Narayen, and Sybase (SY) CEO John Chen, met with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, among others. Their visit comes as the tech sector is generally enthused about some elements of the administration’s stimulus package, but beginning to express worries about potential tax hikes being suggested to pay for the expanded government spending.

The executives highlighted the contribution of the tech sector to the U.S. economy—the country exported $36 billion worth of software more than it imported in 2008—and advocated for policy changes that would help the sector, says Robert Holleyman, president of the Business Software Alliance, the trade organization that arranged the meetings.

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It’s not much of a secret that a lot of software has security flaws. One reason is that there aren’t any real standards for designing secure software. In fact, the right way to secure programs is rarely discussed at all.

A new group is hoping to change that. Tech security company Fortify and security consulting firm Cigital are getting ready to release a set of best practices that tech companies and other businesses can follow to ensure that the software they develop is secure. The authors developed the model by studying the security practices at Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Adobe (ADBE), and other tech companies, as well as nontech companies that write their own software like Wells Fargo, and Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.

“For most of the last decade security has taken place in secret,” says Brian Chess, chief scientist at Fortify. Even the most basic security information is usually held close to the vest for fear that bad guys could use it to compromise a system. The lack of transparency serves a purpose, but it comes at the expense of helping other companies improve the security of their software.

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Amazon has caved into demands from the Authors Guild that it disable the ability of the Kindle to read a book aloud. This is very bad news.

We had this battle before. In 2001, Adobe released e-book technology that gave rights holders (including publishers of public domain books) the ability to control whether the Adobe e-book reader read the book aloud. The story got famous when it was shown that one of its public domain works–“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”–was marked to forbid the book to be read aloud….

Now the issue is back. The Authors Guild has objected because Amazon’s Kindle 2 has a function built in that enables the book to be read aloud. So when, for example, you’re commuting, you can plug your Kindle 2 into your MP3 jack and have the book read aloud.

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Adobe (ADBE) shares are trading lower this morning after RBC Capital analyst Robert Breza trimmed his estimates and price target on the stock, noting that the upgrade cycle for the recently released Creative Suite 4 has been slowed by the weak economy.

“Our current checks indicate that Adobe’s end markets of enterprises, knowledge workers, designers, OEM partners and developers remain under pressure worldwide,” he writes. “Customers remain reluctant to part with cash and engage in education programs to upgrade to the newly released CS4.” He adds that checks with distribution partners find “a tough business climate” in the company’s fiscal first quarter ending this month. He says that it looks like more customers will skip the new version of Creative Suite and wait for version 5, due in a year or so.

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Adobe Systems (ADBE) may have a claim to the world record for most software downloads in a day–if the company wants to push its case.

Over the summer, the Mozilla Foundation, which makes the Firefox Web browser, started a campaign to break the Guinness World Record for the most times a piece of software was downloaded in a single day. It reached its goal in June when its new Firefox 3 was downloaded eight million times, an achievement aided by the fact that the record didn’t exist before. The company was officially recognized with the record for “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours,” according to a company blog post.

On Thursday, Adobe issued a press release touting the success of its Flash video player, software which is used to watch online videos.

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Steve Jobs didn’t show up to the first Macworld Expo, which was held in San Francisco in January 1985, one year after the introduction of the Macintosh. He was in the city, but he spent most of his time holed up at the Union Square Hyatt Hotel with his strikingly beautiful blond girlfriend, whom I only knew as Tina. I know this because Jobs and Tina came to the Macworld magazine dinner party I put together at the Sutter 500 restaurant to celebrate the success of the first expo, and of the first year of the Mac itself.

There were about 20 of us at the dinner, including the late, great Chronicle columnist Herb Caen; Will Hearst, then editor and publisher of the competing San Francisco Examiner; John Sculley, CEO of Apple (AAPL); John Warnock, founder of the software company Adobe (ADBE); and Ted Leonsis, the AOL executive, who these days owns the Washington Wizards basketball team and the Washington Capitals hockey team.

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Adobe (ADBE) this morning officially launched the latest version of its flagship software package, Creative Suite 4. The announcements included a variety of versions and slices of the new software: There are Design, Web and Production versions, a “Master Collection” with all versions of the new software, 13 standalone products, including new versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Dreamweaver, among others, along with “14 integrated technologies and seven services.” Whatever that means.

Adobe said street prices are expected to be $1,799 for CS4 Design Premium edition, $1,699 for the CS4 Web Premium and Production Premium, and $2,499 for CS4 Master Collection.

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During a recent earnings call, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said that his company will “work with Apple” to ensure that Flash apps would run on the iPhone. This after Steve Jobs publicly dissed Flash as being “too slow to be useful” and its stepsister Flash Lite as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

But like Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” Flash is not going to be ignored.

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On a week when Microsoft landed a big deal to put Silverlight on Nokia phones, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, tells Adobe that there won’t be Flash on the iPhone. This is a real bummer for Adobe and many users and developers, because most of the world’s casual games are written for Flash. Just go over to game site Kongregate. Or, look at the world’s video like that on YouTube (or any other video site like the Qik one that I use on my cellphone). Almost all of it is done in Flash. Now developers at those sites will need to find some other method to get those games and videos onto the iPhone. This is a HUGE opening for Microsoft to take momentum and mind share away from Flash/Flex/AIR with its Silverlight set of technologies (which, based on my Twitter conversations, is winning developers over at a pretty good pace).

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The line between software that people access over the Internet and software that resides on their PCs will blur over the next several years, as an announcement from Adobe reminds us.

Adobe today introduced AIR, an application that lets people access Web sites even when they aren’t online. Someone who wants to put an item up for bid on eBay, for example, could fill out the form through the AIR software while the PC isn’t connected to the Web. The software would automatically post the information to eBay the next time the computer is connected to the Internet.

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