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Comment by alec | Hacker News Reader

"Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion."

They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell, there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.

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Perhaps we are using the phrase killer product in different ways. When I use it, I don't mean that it's popular, I mean that it's so desirable to its customers that they subordinate all other considerations to it.

For example, Visicalc was a killer product: People bought computers to run Visicalc, rather than buying a spreadsheet to run on their computers. PageMaker was a killer product: People bought Macs to run PageMaker rather than choosing a desktop publishing program to run on their Macs.

For all its ubiquity, Flash is not a killer product outside of the video delivery realm: People obviously do not choose a phone to run their Flash games, and developers seem fine learning an entirely new language (Objective C) and framework (Cocoa) to build iPhone applications.

Flash is a killer product in exactly the same sense that J2EE is a killer product.

The problem for Adobe is that you can't win this battle with just any old killer product, only a killer application. It has to be software that does something people need, and does it significantly better than anyone else's software. Adobe doesn't want to write a killer application, it wants to control the killer platform.

And in the technology world today, I'm not sure there is any such thing.

From the article: "When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, lightweight version of Flash for mobile devices, .... It was no sure thing that this device would succeed at the time, and giving it every chance to (by including something like Flash) would have made sense. But there was no version of Flash ready that would run on the device (presumably without massive performance/battery hits)."

There were the obvious performance problems, which caused apple not to support flash in iphone.

They sure have a "killer" product(which has worked for them this far), but html5 support by websites is increasing everyday. This is probably because not only it's natively supported and doesn't need a external plugin to run, but overall experience is much better than flash itself.

I think there is not much that adobe can do now to stop this but get along and write great tools for html5 itself.

Sure, it's ubiquitous... but it's also nearly as cruft-laden as Java, and the Flash tools definitely don't reflect the years of "effort" that have gone into them.

Seriously, you have to be a complete fool to CHOOSE to build an IDE on top of the bug-ridden warthog that is eclipse, do a bad job of implementing it, and then on top of that charge for it.

Given the choice, I would pick Silverlight over Flash without hesitation -- because as a developer I want the tools that will let me do my job most efficiently without forcing me to do it THEIR way, and the Silverlight toolchain does precisely that. Expression Blend + Visual Studio isn't perfect, but it blows the doors off of eclipse and Flash.

But then how's there a YouTube player on the iPad? Something doesn't add up.

Because Apple wrote one from scratch?

Apple payed Google to transcode the videos to H.264.

FYI downvoters: http://newteevee.com/2007/06/03/youtube-goes-h264-thanks-to-...

And your cited "article" supports your claim that Apple paid Google for the effort where, exactly?

OK, first, if you find that link unbelievable, which I assume from your scare quotes, there are many others, e.g. http://www.last100.com/2007/06/01/youtube-to-re-encode-video.... This was big news in 2007, when Jobs demoed (the now kinda defunct but may be due for a comeback) Apple TV. As the quote by Apple VP David Moody says, the transcoding was done purely for Apple.

Now, to the question whether Apple paid Google: I don't think anybody saw them writing Google a big check, "paid" in this sense is making concessions to Google, like having Google as the default search engine. This was of course in the good old days when Schmidt was on the board. If you think about it, transcoding all those videos into H.264 is a huge effort, something that Google wouldn't have taken lightly. Of course, at that time YouTube was (and still is) under intense pressure to make profits so that may have helped Apple's hand.

Google also controls Android, which benefits from being able to play h.264 youtube videos. Google has perfectly selfish reasons for undertaking such an effort as well.

Youtube has supported flash-free streams to mobile devices for a long time - long before the iphone came out, even. (I remember seeing this back when I was starting an internship at RIM, several years back)

OK, so Flash isn't necessary to access YouTube, and that is one of Flash supporter's main arguments.

Not sure making that point deserves a -4.

Tell me about it :-) I guess there are some people who are very sensitive about this issue.

Fact of the matter is: Flash was necessary to access YouTube before Apple demanded the H.264 transcoding.

The iPhone debuted on Jan, 2007, YT became publicly available mid-2005. When was your internship, I'm curious? Did they have a separate mobile version of videos? I thought they only had one version of videos, but maybe I missed it.

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