Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

Adobe was once a seriously great company (Jobs apparently talked wistfully about those days in his Q&A), which together with Apple pretty much created desktop publishing and everything that goes with it (like Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, PDF, PageMaker, InDesign). The world would be a much worse place without it.

It started going off the rails after founders Geschke and Warnock left but after the Macromedia deal went through in 2005 the lunacy just took off. The only bright spot since then has been Lightroom -- sorry Adobe Photoshop Lightroom -- and even that was a skunkworks project that they had effectively killed until Apple previewed Aperture. All the rest has been just hicky and nasty, and Flash has become endemic (Flash for Photoshop palettes? Really?)

It feels to me as though, rather than being acquired, Macromedia has actually overrun Adobe, to its serious detriment. There's lots of precedent for this in tech deals like this: there were big political struggles in Apple between the incoming NeXT people and the existing Apple people (those struggles emerged as Carbon vs Cocoa, and you can guess who won).

I don't have any insider information on this, but it's interesting to note that all this recent childish posturing and blow-harding about Flash has come from former Macromedia people (this link, the inane blue lego image, everything jdowdell writes). Meanwhile, old Adobe hands like John Nack have been pointing out that, actually, the company's future lies in making great communication tools, not in making sure Flash "wins" a pointless fight.

The iPhone story is irrelevant in this context ... I don't think there are too many people wanting to play flash-games or to watch porn on that little screen ... especially since you need both hands to navigate its tiny browser ;)

Their strong response to the iPad does show one thing though ... they are getting desperate and they are really afraid of HTML5.

Open Access? That should be more like "convenient access". Open access is when the standard is open and has been implemented by third-parties. That's not Flash.

Boy, they are in worse shape than I first thought. They will open source the parts they own of this beast, the problem is it will be too late to make a difference.

Sure, he brings up the fact that they can update the majority of Web clients in less than a year. But what was it they said about the currently fastest growing web-browser out there? 95% of browsers updated within the span of a few weeks? (I don't recall the sources, sadly)

And this one is almost too good to not take out of context: "We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications". Oh well.

This open source project is getting more interesting now.

towards the later part of his text, he argues for an open access to all devices, yet his app is not open (to apple's accusation that flash crashes a lot and part of that is others can't fix the problems that flash causes their systems- flash being a closed system). Maybe one can illuminate

Please note that the comments aren't currently working and we're in the process of fixing right now.

Oh, Adobe. Hello? Hello?

It's time to let their proprietary VM die, because modern browsers already have all those features working better. Adobe's advantage is in making animation a point-and-click operation that doesn't involve programming. They need to let Flash die and embrace the open version of Flash; JavaScript.

And how much of that is just ads?

The important products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) were mature about ten years ago, and there's not much they could have done to improve them, aside from porting them to newer OSes and adding minor features. So there was a push to use their resources in some other way, which has obviously been to build platforms. The trouble with this is that Adobe is awful at it! They moved far away from what they were competent at, ruining their products along the way. Think about the terrible things Adobe has done to their products in the last decade:

* Acrobat reader is a ridiculously slow and bloated product. Preview.app is much faster and nicer-looking. I uninstall Acrobat whenever I can, and tell other people to do the same.

* Their creative suite has a ridiculously slow installer. Just let us drag the app to the Applications folder and leave things alone!

* They don't obey user interface guidelines (they never really did), but what they come up with now is almost always worse. (It wasn't always that way - the vertical toolbar was beautiful.) They really didn't need to add that crappy horizontal bar thing to Photoshop and Illustrator.

What should they do? Sell to Apple at a firesale price (which will seem really, really high after Adobe craters over the next five years). They should then get rid of everyone that manages all of this redundant platform-building bullshit (this would save Acrobat on Windows by making it decent - but then again, I'm not sure that Windows will be a major consumer platform in five years), and focus on building the beautiful creative tools that made their company great once. While there's a lot of work left to do to make Photoshop and Illustrator take advantage of the multitouch technologies that are coming in future Macs, we may rest assured that Adobe's present management will find a way to fuck it up.

Not really. Most of that 75% is in h.264, a format supported natively by every browser/platform that doesn't support Flash (e.g. iPad) and some that do (e.g. Chrome). Even Microsoft, if and when they do implement <video>, are likely to support it.

It may be messier than just assuming Flash is available (welcome to web "standards"!), but I would hardly call it "the dark ages".

I'm already living here in the dark ages with Flash performance on OSX. Things can't get much worse.

Flash is merely one of these content delivery tools (often delivering it in a frustrating non-standard way). Repeat: a content delivery tool. Flash in itself is not content, aside from some visual senses when used as art or music or performance.

Now of course, the manner the content is delivered is important to some. Important to branding & marketing. That's an entirely nother topic. But to generalize, the manner of content delivery is becoming less and less relevant. A person wants to see a video or read an article. They want to read and write comments. They want to see related material. These are the absolute essentials, and Flash is absolutely unnecessary for this.

I do see one last branch that will save Flash until there is alternative. Streaming video. Live sports and events will be getting much much bigger in the near future. When there is an easier alternative, then Flash will be gone.