Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Not Worried About the Future of Flash
An anonymous reader writes "Adobe company man John Dowdell isn't worried about the future of Flash. He writes in his company blog, 'There's really no "HTML vs Flash" war. There are sure people inciting to create such a war, and individual developers may have strong practical reasons to choose one technology over another, but at corporate levels that drive strategy, all delivery channels are important Adobe territory, whether SWF or HTML or video or documents or paper or ebook or e-mag or film or packaging or whatever. Adobe profits by making it easier for creatives to reach their audiences. We're on the verge of a disruptive change that, I think, will dwarf that of the World Wide Web fifteen years ago. It was great back then when any wealthy person with a workstation in a wired environment could easily reach any creative's webpage. With these cheaper devices we'll be reaching far more people, and with pocket devices we'll be reaching them throughout the day instead of just when "logged-on." The WWW was merely a pale precursor of the excitement we're going to see, I think.' It's interesting to note that he talks about the World Wide Web in the past tense. I find it instructive as to Adobe's perspective. Personally, I'm not worried about the future of Flash either. I don't think it has one."
It'll take a while, because IE 9 doesn't support XP, but it'll happen. Flash dies once XP dies.
Microsoft would like to fully control the interfaces, but when they fail at that they'd at least like to stop any other company from controlling the interfaces. Microsoft will settle for open standards as required to kill things like flash.
We can thank Adobe for IE 9 getting SVG and HTML 5 video support.
I think you hit on the most important part there in your second sentence. Really, Adobe makes zero money from flash itself, everyone gets that for free. They make their money from the Flash development tools, tools that make it easy to build an awesome (ok, for varying definitions of awesome) web page. From their perspective, it doesn't matter if the underlying technology is Flash, HTML 5, or something different. They are confident they can build the best tools to work with whatever that technology is, and thus will continue to make money.
Qxe4
I couldn't care less what new gizmos and glitz the web has ... what I care about is that if I create apps, just like documents and databases, I want to still be able to access and use them 20 or 40 years from now without recoding and reformatting them. The gold rush is over. What I want now is bulletproof base of archival-quality standards, not ones that reinvent themselves every product cycle.
Yes there is. Right now, Adobe has locks on both the production and consumption sides of Flash. Notably, they periodically add features to Flash that anyone else who makes a flash editor or player doesn't support. Heck, the GNU Flash player, Gnash, is still back on Flash 7 with some features of 8 and 9; the current version of Flash is Flash 11.
Adobe controls neither production or consumption sides of HTML5. They would just be a single developer making a product in this market segment.
As a side point, Flash was originally created as a vector animation tool. Strangely, it became hugely popular, largely supplanting its parent, Macromedia (now Adobe) Shockwave.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It surprises me that in all of the discussions about how HTML5 is going to murder Flash, the one thing that everyone overlooks is the exact reason why Flash continues to be popular - Cross-browser consistency.
I mean, right now, you cannot expect any of the five browsers to display CSS2 consistently, and that spec has been around since 1998. Why is it that everyone expects HTML5 to be perfect out of the box on every platform?
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
I find it instructive as to Adobe's perspective.
That would be a bad idea.
John Dowdell is a "user relations" guy at Adobe. He answers to users on support forums, writes a blog on Adobe topics and reads customer feedback at Adobe.
He doesn't speak for Adobe's strategy, nor is his opinion to be considered that of Adobe. In fact it says so on his blog: "Views are my own".
Plus, Adobe's been saying for the past few years "there's no HTML vs Flash" war namely since they don't want to position Flash as an HTML alternative (which is stupid in 2010) but as necessary extension to HTML.
You see? It's subtle. HTML won't replace Flash, but you still need Flash together with HTML in your browser and your mobile device (by the way: Flash 10.1 coming to a cellphones pretty soon). It's just another step in a survival strategy that will keep Flash from becoming irrelevant.
All their latest features focus on the unique strengths of a proprietary binary plugin that a public standard like HTML can't deliver quickly, or at all, which is: fully consistent performance across platforms, quick innovation, highly specialized features (such as pixel shaders, is this coming in HTML5? No. I thought so). We need that ingredient too, next to HTML5, to form a healthy ecosystem on the web, as much as some people hate to admit it.
But John Dowdell still doesn't speak for Adobe's strategy, so accept his blog for what it is.
The main point for me is that since I have uninstalled flash from my computer, my browser doesn't crash anymore. My scrollwheel always works, no matter where my mouse is on the screen. My TAB keyboard sequence isn't screwed up anytime the focus goes to an ad.
Granted, the problem is less painful with Chrome (one process per windows so flash doesn't crash the window, just the tab), but still!
Write boring code, not shiny code!