Adobe Surrenders in the Flash Wars

When the iPhone was released, Apple was castigated for one serious omission in their otherwise superlative web browser - THERE WAS NO FLASH PLAYER! Flash had been an important part of making the web more interactive. Surely, Steve Jobs wouldn't exclude this important technology, right? "Not so," pronounced Apple, "HTML5 could do everything Flash did, and better, with superior battery life for mobile devices." The critics grumbled, but consoled themselves that eventually Apple would come around. And competing mobile Operating Systems made "Flash support" a central part of their marketing campaigns.

Five years, five iPhones, and two iPads later, Apple still hasn't included Flash and yet remains the dominant player in the mobile space (although Android now ships more phones). And Adobe? Adobe has surrendered, ceasing all development of Flash for Mobile Browsers. Instead, they will focus all efforts on enabling developers to build Apps and deploy HTML5 solutions.

Steve jobs drops the Blog Bomb on Adobe

It is a rare thing when Steve Jobs bothers to comment on anything that is not his own product. But apparently the criticism over Apple's banning of Adobe's Flash and Cross-Platform Compiler from iPad and iPhones was enough to get him typing. The bottom line: Flash is not on the iPhone/iPad, it's not COMING to the iPhone/iPad, and Adobe had plenty of chances to change Apple's mind in the past.

Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath.

Between this battle and the Gizmodo legal troubles, Apple seems to have decided it likes being the center of all media attention. Good or bad.

Are HTML5 Video betas specifically for the Apple Tablet?

If you're not a geek, the recent moves by YouTube to begin a beta of HTML5 videos quickly followed by Vimeo doing the same thing probably warranted nothing more than a feeling of "So what?"

HTML 5 is the newest specification for how web pages (and more) can be built for viewing in a web browser. One of the most significant changes for this new version is the handling of video and other rich media technologies. In the past, the only way to have video on the web was either to have users download video files and play them manually on their computer, or to use a technology like Adobe Flash or Java to play them in a custom-built module (this is how both YouTube and Vimeo do it today). In HTML 5, browsers will instead be capable of supporting specific video file types directly in the browser. Currently, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all support some form of HTML 5 (Firefox does not support the new implementations of YouTube and Vimeo). By pushing video to the browser itself, we allow for more direct interaction with video, and a more efficient memory footprint for handling it, allowing better performance with less horsepower (and less battery required).

But it is especially significant that these changes are being released only a week before Apple is expected to announce a Tablet Computer. The iTablet or iSlate or whatever the name could have been designed to run MacOS X like a laptop or the iPhoneOS - and while MacOS X has a (memory and CPU hungry) implementation of Adobe Flash, the iPhoneOS has explicitly banned it. The fact that these moves are being made now may imply that Google (which has a long relationship with Apple and is likely to be on stage next week when the Tablet is announced) knows the Tablet will run iPhoneOS and thus will not support Adobe Flash. This may mean an end to Adobe's near-monopoly on rich interactive content on the web, and especially with regards to video. Which may change the Web more than you expect.

We live in interesting times.

Apple acquiring Adobe would be a bad thing

As I was perusing Slashdot today I came across this article that proposed that Apple should purchase Adobe. On first blush this sort of makes some sense and the author makes most of the sensible points pretty convincingly. I use Apple and Adobe products everyday - several thousand dollars worth of each every day - so I'm very familiar and biased towards the goodness of each. My problem with this idea of Apple buying Adobe isn't with the concept of two great companies working together as one, but rather that it eliminates some of the market. I am by no means an expert on market forces or economic competition and I don't play one on tv, but it seems that taking Adobe out of the mix would push Apple less and would push Adobe to innovate less.

As a case in point, a couple of years ago Adobe purchased Macromedia - the makers of fine software like Dreamweaver and Flash (both the best of their breed in their respective niches). Before the purchase Adobe was working on competing products GoLive vs. Dreamweaver and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) vs. Flash. All four were great products, but Dreamweaver and Flash were definitely the better products. So what did Adobe do, they bought the competition. So now GoLive is history and SVG has been left to the open source world to possibly enhance. Dreamweaver and Flash have gotten better, but not noticeably so - despite the fact that Flash is almost inescapable in our current web environment.

The question is then, would Adobe get better if Apple purchased them? Adobe's flagship programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign and the previously mentioned Dreamweaver and Flash) are already without competition. Sure there are other products that try to do the same things, but hardly any of them are nearly as good or compete any more - with the possible exception of Quark even though they're pretty stagnate in terms of market share. At this point Adobe and Apple are pushing each other to be better - especially in the area of pro-photography with competing programs Lightroom (Adobe) and Aperture (Apple). If they were to become one company the market forces that make each of them have to innovate to retain the creative professional market would disintegrate and they would be worse for it. So, I think this would be a bad thing as much as it might sound great from an Apple/Adobe devotee perspective.