The death of Flash
In what could only be a confirmation that HTML 5 will be the future of mobile video, Adobe announced recently that it will stop developing Flash Player for browsers on mobile. The company has said that it will not completely halt the development of the software but it will continue to develop it for desktops. I remember talking to a friend of mine a couple years ago whose major gripe with Apple devices was that they don’t run Flash. But as it turns out, it is Flash who has to go not Apple who needs to adapt. In one particular blog written by an Adobe employee, he mentioned that Adobe has been a fan of HTML5 for a while. Rather than devote time and energy to working on a platform that 1) needed to be tweaked for different OSs and hardware configurations and 2) would never be as widely-used as they would like, Adobe decided that those resources would be better spent furthering HTML5 development.
As the age of Smartphones arrived, Adobe may have realized that Flash will never be a dominant player on mobile devices as it was on desktops. Flash missed this bus when Apple refused to load their iPods and iPads with Flash. The slow decline of this once popular program first to irrelevancy and then to its demise, is inextricably tied to its history with Apple. The blogosphere declared this as a posthumous victory for late Steve Jobs. Here’s the story:
Adobe and Apple
The year was 1985 and Apple and Adobe had together revolutionized desktop publishing. Steve Jobs firmly believed that he had helped Adobe find its place on the map when they were a small shop in the “garage”. After his ouster and then later his return to Apple in 1999, Jobs asked Adobe to start making its video editing software and other products for the new iMac and its new operating system but Adobe refused. This denial resulted in a bitter war between the two companies. Steve Jobs never allowed iPod and iPad to run Flash. He even banned apps that made use of a compiler created by Adobe that would enable compatibility with Apple’s iOS. Steve Jobs’ opposition to Flash was, according to him, based on a number of technology flaws that he believed Flash had. He even wrote an open letter outlining all of these. But many believe that a lot of the points in his letter can be refuted and the simple reason that Flash never made it on Apple’s devices was the grudge that Jobs held against Adobe.
It is funny how demise of technologies can be contributed to failure of a company to innovate but also tied to very human elements like egos and grudges of the people involved.
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