I titled this post like I have the authority to legitimately comment on a divisive situation in Silicon Valley. I don’t, but I’d like to try.
Steve Jobs posted Thoughts on Flash. The Social Web immediately lit up. Some defending Jobs, some critiquing either his motives or arguments.
I’d like to point out, first, that I am not a developer, nor do I purport to be. I am, however, very mindful of the processes and technologies that drive the internet forward. As someone who quite literally hangs his hat on the exploitation of the opportunities created by technologies developed by other people it is crucial that I stay on top of the waves of the future, lest I be swept beneath them.
That said, HTML5 is that wave of the future, for now. I have thought for a very long time that Flash was at best passé, at worst a distracting side effect of the abundance of developers and the relative simplicity of Actionscript compared to, say, C#. That is to say, there are a lot more crappy applications and games developed in Flash than in virtually any other programming language. What I am saying sounds like a sweeping generalization and to my many friends who are Flash literate, I apologize. Flash has served the web well and has driven it forward in a way no other technology was prepared to five years ago.
The ride is over, Adobe. Not your technology, but your platform. The people standing on the sidelines crying that Flash provides a fuller web experience are of the same mindset as the people who cried that MySpace shouldn’t have been losing relevance as the network continued to grow. Flash has been overtaken in features, in speed, and in universal usability by HTML5. It’s time to step up to the microphone and make the difficult concession speech or you risk shutting down your Flash division 10 years after it became irrelevant.
The web has so much more to offer now than when Flash was necessary just to embed video. Although 75% of web video is still Flash, as Jobs pointed out, most of it is available in other formats. When CBS, CNN, the NYT, ABC, Netflix, Facebook, and even your darling YouTube abandon your format, it’s dead whether you want to fight it or not.
I am a Mac user, but I don’t have an iPhone or iPad, so I’m not even commenting on the mobile web as Jobs did, I’m talking about the web in general. The web has grown up and Flash is still drawing stick figures on the bathroom wall.
Adobe, you have so much to offer in terms of talent and technology. I know that several recent advancements have made your platform more robust and feature-rich, but if the developers aren’t taking advantage of it, the content producers aren’t utilizing it, and the Operating Systems are disallowing it because of the poor average quality of the applications developed on it, then please take the hint.
