How Adobe Flash Lost Its Way

snydeq writes "Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. 'The bigger picture — which I've touched on before — is that major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps. That's long been the case on iOS and other smartphone platforms, and now it's starting to be the norm on Windows. Each step of the way, Adobe is getting left behind,' McAllister writes. 'Perhaps Adobe's biggest problem, however, is that it's something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn't make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"

Comments

That is not the only problem.

[Musically_ut]

Flash does not in particular have a very good history with respect to its own development either. Everybody on *nix has observed this so much that this has become a cult phenomenon.

Moreover, the problem does not lie completely with *nix developers themselves. Case in point, it takes them months to fix their broken calls to memcpy which were:

traced to Adobe Flash by maintainers of glibc at Red Hat, Linus Torvalds and others.

Full story here.

Relevant part of the conversation:

> Subject: Re: FP-5739 "Strange sound on mp3 flash website with Fedora 14 x86_64"
>
> Hi Shu,
>
> That's is great to hear. Would you guess it's a matter of days, weeks or
> months before this can get fixed?
> If it will take a long time for you to fix this, Fedora may need to look
> at some way to work around this bug.
>
> Best regards,
> Magnus
>

> Hi Magnus,
>
> Maybe months. Thanks.
>
> Best regards.

Video

[tverbeek]

IMHO, Flash lost its way when they added video support to it (around the time that Adobe bought Macromedia, as I recall). Before that, Flash was all about the vectors. (You could import bitmaps into it too, but they wouldn't scale well, so those were best used just for static background elements.) It was a way to do animation without pushing full pre-rendered frames down to the client: just describe the shapes then tell the player how to manipulate them. It provided a toolset to produce rich user interfaces that you couldn't even hope to dream of doing with (incompatible implementations of) HTML3 and Javascript, and even HTML4 with CSS can't pull off the same stuff today. The Flash plugin was a lean and efficient client, and close enough to being ubiquitous. Then they tacked video support onto it (which was all about pushing pre-rendered frames down to the client), and it became a video-player plugin (with vector support). The fact that people talk today about replacing Flash with a video codec shows how completely that added feature usurped the original functionality.