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Six Reasons Why Flash Isn't Going Away
CWmike writes "While Steve Jobs is betting his mobile platform on it, predicting Flash's demise is short-sighted, say industry analysts. 'There are many people who despise Flash, but I'm not sure they'd love the alternative right out of the gate. The open-source world has not blown everyone out of the water with their video work thus far,' Michael Cote, an analyst at RedMon, told Howard Wen. 'Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome.' Here are six factors that give Flash a strong position over HTML 5 and other alternative Web media technologies in the foreseeable future. For starters, While Android has made Flash a wedge issue, Flash is just beginning to show up on multiple mobile device platforms, Wen writes. Ross Rubin, an analyst at NPD Group, reminds us how Flash ushered in video on Web pages, but Craig Barberich, vice president of marketing and business development at Coincident TV, highlights the pervasiveness of Flash on the Web as we know it: 'Everybody is talking about video, but what doesn't necessarily get talked about is a lot of the interactive elements.'"
Why? The people fearmongering over Apple's refusal to allow Flash developers access to their devices apparently don't need to get their facts straight.
You can always buy phones without a plan...even the iPhone.
iPhone without a plan? In the United States?
Are you that damn lazy? Take a trip to Canada, go to an Apple store and buy an unlocked iPhone directly from Apple at an Apple store.
Alternatively, if you have a friend in Canada, they can order the unlocked phone directly from Apple for you and ship it to you after they get it or they can go to an Apple store, buy the unlocked phone and ship it to you.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Jobs doesn't really want to drive the competitor out of HIS marketplace... he has absolute control there. If he say "no Flash", there's no Flash.
The problem, of course, is consumer demand -- if Steve says "no HTML", there would be no HTML, but it would be a problem. People need HTML.
So his goal was to marginalize Flash... make people, or at least iPhonies, believe they don't need or, for that matter want Flash. Part of this was very easy -- Apple didn't both to open up the video acceleration APIs on the iPhone, so only Apple could do high performance video using video acceleration. Problem solved -- Flash, or for that matter, any other video not using Apple's high-level APIs, would simply suck. This was even true of the MacOS until earlier this year.
And they might just have got away with it.. .because Flash kind of sucked on the Mac (due as much to Apple as Adobe.. .both somewhat at fault), and Apple was becoming successful in spreading the "Flash Don't Work on Smartphones" meme, Ok, well, there were a few of these Nokia phones that did Flash just dandy, but we in the US ignore them anyway.
Only now, there's Flash on Android, it's pretty good... and Android has outsold iPhone for the last two quarters... quite nicely, if you look at the Global market. Most Android phones will have Flash bundled in by late 2010 or early 2011. Fact is, most new smart phones are substantially faster than PCs were when Flash was young. The main concern is battery life, but with most Flash video in H.264, Flash video isn't going to eat more battery than any other H.264 video.
Apple, of course, wants to kill Flash so they control the purse strings. Free video is fine, do it in HTML5. Want to DRM or charge for something? Your only choice is iTunes downloads. Apple gets ALL the money for things you pay into on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod.
-Dave Haynie