Monday, October 3, 2011

How Adobe Flash lost its way

InfoWorld, September 29, 2011

This is an interesting article about the decline of Adobe Flash as a standard web platform for creating and viewing material on the web. The author mentions that Adobe only makes money by selling the developer tools. But with Apple, Google and Microsoft giving away their developer tools and instead making money from their app-stores, Adobe has missed the boat. They failed to adjust their strategy as consumers turned toward apps that run on mobile devices without using web browsers. Adobe will soon release AIR 3, which will allow developers to create richer applications with advanced graphics and 3D capability. However, this doesn’t address their main problem, which is that they’re still missing out on any money made from developers creating AIR apps and selling them. Adobe needs to re-think where they fit in the consumer electronics network of 2011 and beyond.

1 comment:

  1. I believe Flash's biggest differentiator, at least to enterprise, is control. As amazing as HTML5 is, it hasn't matured to the point where you have control over a media channel, for example -- analogous to HDCP for television sets.

    Until competitors can replicate this functionality and create a robust platform for it (which I think is inevitable), Flash will be around. Also, for restaurant website intros when all you want is the menu.

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