"Great Web Site, Pixar" -- Seriously?
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
Yes, your 0.002% market penetration new toy doesn't support Flash, and yes you trawled the net for a site that had no alt content for it's Flash content aimed at a demographic that will be 99% Flash enabled.
Marketing is not a business that deals in 100%s, neither is web development. If you chose specifically to be in the 1% then there is no big message here, no champagne room, no deep-rooted moral to martyr.
Disney had a demographic in mind and a marketing experience they wanted those people to have and spent their money accordingly. Something any number of companies do every day.
Although, you could argue that Catmull and Lasseter are more responsible for this than Jobs is...
But at some point it is fair to draw a line. A very small percentage of my visitors are using IE5. My sites don't work at all in IE5. I don't intend to address this problem.
I'm wondering what a media rich site _should_ do in this case. Can you really afford to build 2 (or _n_ ) sites for every available device, when cheap hardware (netbooks, phones) will play flash?
All the more reason why Apple needs to get over themselves and support flash.
Push HTML5 because yes it is better but support flash until it is no longer used.
http://jeffcroft.com/blog/2010/may/08/android-flash-demo-fla...
Refusing to support older technologies helps encourage people to start using the newer technologies. If everyone dropped support for flash (obviously this wouldn't actually happen) then developers would be forced to use alternatives. If flash continues to be supported then developers have less of an incentive to replace their current solutions.
It would be an irresponsible developer that let loose with full HTML5 site aimed at "normal" people any time soon if they didnt provide a full standard HTML version as well, which begs a huge budget question. Unless they have no marketing department or CTO to answer to of course.
If by "newer technologies" you mean "The Apple App Store" then you have a point. If you mean HTML5, then you have been taken to the cleaners are terribly gullible.
However, i'll bite. Why would I be gullible for believing that HTML 5 (and by extention, the APIs such as canvas and offline storage) is newer than Flash? Acording to Wikipedia, the first working draft of HTML 5 was published in 2008. Flash has been around for a lot longer than this.
Worrying about what the pundits say isn't going to help us execute, unless the pundit is someone with hard-won expertise and experience in what you're doing/building. Just pick the right tool for your product and market and run with it.
I also don't know how involved steve jobs is on a day to day basis at pixar anymore. I'm pretty sure he isn't reviewing the website though.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruber/4594658152/#comment72157...
Four years later, the story repeats itself: Disney's five-movie partnership with Pixar ends and Disney owns all the movie characters, so they decide to make a direct-to-video Toy Story 3 with their in-house studios. Then Eisner leaves, Disney buys Pixar, the Pixar guys are put in charge of Disney Animation Studios, and Toy Story 3 gets shelved so that it can be redone from scratch as a theatrical release by Pixar. Given the history, I expect that it, too, will be a decent film.
It does not make sense to provide a link to download flash on these devices.
I do remember reading his site and enjoying it in the past. Now...holy shit I can't stand it. It's like reading an eager hopeful of the politburo trying to impress the communist ranks. All credibility has long gone out the window.