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Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

I was always surprised by Adobe's lack of product thinking and software development chops and their revenue and share price (inversely proportional).

All of their products never evolved, very poorly integrated, terrible UX and product design in general, bad software development maturity.

The last one is an educated guess based upon all of the previous points and also Steve Jobs publicly shaming them due to Adobe's inability to react on Flash issues. [1]

Adobe took very long time to react to Sketch software challenge, and the result (Adobe XD)is just about OK, nothing remarkable.

[1] Steve Jobs' open letter:

Thoughts on Flash

https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

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I don’t know. They can develop excellent software but it seems they are very deliberate in what they put energy into. Reminds me a little of Microsoft. They can produce excellent products if they are forced to but they are perfectly content with producing mediocre stuff as long as the business is fine.

I'm always amazed that Adobe just let Flash go without a fight. For a while they practically owned the "web development platform". It's as if Microsoft decided to stop developing Windows and said "eh, just install Linux".

Don't get me wrong - I'm very glad we're all working in HTML5/Javascript/etc today and not ActionScript. And it would have required a herculean effort by Adobe to fix all of Flash's issues - probably a total rewrite of everything. But it's a lot easier to rewrite software than rebuild a giant community of developers.

From a strict business game theory perspective, it seems like Adobe really screwed this one up.

Without a fight? My recollection is that it died an extremely slow, prolonged death.

The thing they have up without a fight was Flex, their Rich Internet Application dev framework.

When they abandoned support for it they killed the careers of thousands of developers and removed their chance of dominating web app development.

Flex was miles ahead of what HTML 5 was producing at the time, if they had focused on getting the Flex compiler to output Javascript we would be living in a world where Adobe was synonymous with Web Dev.

Thoughts on Flash is filed with lies. It opens with lies and continues with lies.

Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs

Source?

Adobe has access to plenty of APIs on Windows, yet it didn’t run any better and was an incessant security nightmare. Why would anyone have a reason to believe that Adobe would’ve done a better job on the mac than much flexible windows?

Adobe’s current performance on Windows and Mac in 2020 does not add any backing to that argument either.

Flash ran massively better on Windows than on Macs. One of Job's specific complaints was that it didn't run as well on Mac as it did on Windows. And that's because they couldn't get the same graphics hardware access they could get on Windows.

The flash player was a perfectly performany piece of software. The piece of shit programs people wrote for it were slow but that was not inherent of Flash. The same people went on to wrote piece of shit HTML 5 apps that peg out your fan just as much.

Lies? The main points were; not ‘open’, which wasn’t wrong or a lie; ‘full web’, again none of the points were incorrect, and hindsight show flash on Androids was a poor user experience. In terms of ‘reliability, security and performance’, flash was a train wreck - no falsehoods there. It certainly rinsed the ‘battery Life’ on my Windows laptop at the time. Finally, it clearly wasn’t designed with ‘touch’ based devices in mind.

Jobs last point harks back to the main development platform for the Mac being Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Macintosh. Apple were essentially beholden to a third party with regard to improving their OS, which along with licensing other hardware vendors, nearly put them out of business. Whether you or anyone agree or disagree with his motive, you could see why Jobs didn’t want to run that risk again. There is also the elephant that is the App Store in the room, but again, once bitten (retailers not carrying Apple Compatible software), you can understand the decision, without necessarily agreeing with it.

> Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs

It didn’t run particularly well on Windows, Linux or Android either...

The SWF spec was completely open, there were multiple Flash players both open source and commercial. So a lie.

Flash was designed, as its very first use case, for touch screen kiosks. So a lie.

Flash Player was perfectly performent, shit code that ran on it is different to the platform. When the first round of HTML 5 demos came out I made my own Flash equivalents, the HTML 5 demos ran at 80% CPU on my machine, the Flash versions ran at 5%.

Not really. It was an open spec, but controlled solely by Adobe.

> Flash was designed, as its very first use case, for touch screen kiosks. So a lie.

Bullshit. It was originally release By FutureWorks(?) as a vector tool to run on PenPointOS - that failed, so they pivoted to use the core as an animation tool for the web. Macromedia bought it added extra functionality, including ‘actions’. Adobe acquired Macromedia, and Flash, in 2006 (if memory serves correct). I remember them stopping development of, the vastly superior to Illustrator (IMHO), Freehand. They release Flex, which you may be confusing with Flash as it was based on it, as a platform for enterprise apps. If there was any kiosk targeted features, they were very definitely and after thought. So no, not lies.

Lastly performance. Annecdata. It ground my laptop to a halt and my desktop sounded like a jet engine taking off. I used quite heavy 3D and cad programs at the time, and even they did hog resources like Flash did. Admittedly, total annecdata. But enough people at the time saw fit to complain about it.

> Apple denied Abobe access to APIs they needed to make Flash run better on Macs

Huh? What APIs are you referring to?

There was no SIP back then, and from what I understand you didn't even have to sign kernel extensions. You could do just about whatever you want... right?

Where can I read more about this?

> Apple denied Abobe access to APIs

This is such nonsense.

Flash was available on Android, has no company hobbling its development, and still ran like cold molasses. It was canned by Adobe years before Flash was discontinued.

Your arguments remind me of the same Adobe fanboyism with which Thoughts on Flash was met at the time it was published — a decade has passed, evidence has disproven everything you’ve said, and you haven’t caught up because facts mustn’t get in the way of decrying the Apple bogeyman.

It turned Windows machines into jet planes, practically sterilised MacBook users who mistakenly ran Flash applets with their machines on their laps, and ran so poorly on Linux that running the Windows version in WINE worked much more; the Android version was over before it started, but no, “Apple blocked muh APIs”.

Give it up: Flash died the death it rightfully deserved. It has its time. That time passed.

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