In a move that is astonishing (at least to me) in its utter lack of hubris, Adobe is in the process of abandoning Flash in favor of HTML5. Call it vindication for Steve Jobs if you will, who steadfastly refused to support Flash on iOS, but no one can fault Adobe on how they are withdrawing from the field of battle.
As noted in TechWorld, Adobe is offering their Flash software development kit Flex, to the Apache Foundation to manage as a project independent of Adobe (it has been open source since 2008). Note that this does not signal that Adobe is dropping Flash like a hot rock, but it does signal a direction away from Flash to HTML 5 and CSS3:
While the company pledged its continued support for Flex — along with its underlying Flash technology — Adobe also suggested that Web application developers in the future would be using HTML5 rather than Flash…
Observers have speculated that Adobe’s retreat from the mobile Flash platform represents the first step in deemphasizing Flash in favor of HTML5. Jack Gold, of analyst firm J.Gold Associates LLC., noted that Adobe faced a daunting task in maintaining Flash across an ever-increasing number of different platforms, as more non-Windows devices enter the marketplace. HTML5, in contrast, can work across all mobile browsers that support the standard, and will require no specific adjustments for each underlying hardware platform.
So yeah, I guess Steve Jobs was right. But it’s also really nice to see how Adobe has acknowledged that HTML5 provides a better technological path forward while also not abandoning the Flash community overnight. Offering up the Flex SDK to the Apache Foundation is a classy move, even if it potentially has the self-serving aspect of freeing up Adobe staff from the increasingly onerous job of keeping it up-to-date on a plethora of platforms. The alternative would have been to end-of-life it, which in some ways may have been easier but also more damaging to the community at large. Way to go, Adobe, you’ve demonstrated the best way to surrender in a technology war.
About Roy Tennant
Actually, he was only 50% right. If you read that rant he had up on the Apple site (sorry, too lazy to retrieve), you’ll see that, according to him, the most important problem with Flash was that it was a third party cross-platform development tool.
Or in other words, the same kind of lock-in reasoning that Microsoft was (in-)famous for using ten years earlier.