Adobe and HTML
html.adobe.com
html.adobe.com
For those that don't remember, Adobe produced an SVG plugin for IE, which they pulled in 2006. Having SVG on all browsers reduced their competitive advantage they had with Flash having a higher penetration then SVG.
Adobe was doing their best to kill off open standards in favour of their proprietary ones 6-7 years ago, a plan that failed due to the poor quality of Flex, IE 9's support for SVG and iOS' dislike of the technology.
It's always amusing to see such folks eat some humble pie, particularly when the technology they were trying to peddle was such a poor piece of engineering.
The new adverts about IE 10 trolls are really an attempt to divert from the real reason people have beef with MS and Adobe. They tried to kill open standards, failed, now want to join the cool gang like nothing happened.
But don't limit our penetrating stare to just those that have historically done this. Keep an eye on where Google are going with the various Chrome extensions.
So, Adobe and HTML, fine, but they only joined us because they couldn't beat us.
Also, ouch on the "poor piece of engineering"... If I recall it has been able to help push some usage of the web forward (Youtube? Before Flash?), and foster creative content (anyone been working in the game or ad industry these past decade could testify... I'm talking Art Directors and Flash devs on websites, not annoying page ads). Or maybe I'm wrong on this - if so, please someone correct me. I don't remember Java succeeded in this field.
I don't want to start a flame war, it's just this anti-someone view, whoever that may be, raises my eyebrow all the time. As far as I know they do what _every_ other company on the field does: use and protect their hero assets for as long as they can, then catch up with the disruptive tech as soon as they penetrate.
But the OA is about Adobe and HTML. Of course, it's not so much that they'll jump to the tech that has displaced them, it's more the marketing language (which, again, I know everyone's at it) suggests "yeah, cool, we always wanted this one to win, honest". They even give a history lesson on the site, and that's not the history I remember.
Poor engineering, that's aimed more at Flex than Flash. I spent many months suffering at the hands of Flex and the Adobe IDE. We implemented exactly the same app in both Flex and Java, Flex and its environment were painful, relatively.
Companies will protect their own interests, but both I personally view Adobe's decision to drop the SVG plugin, and Microsoft's decision to enforce their own standard on IE as de facto, as having put a general drag on what could and can be achieved in browsers. They're entitled to do so, but I think the decisions have been detrimental to the Internet population as whole, that's all.
Absolutely. We're still paying the price(s) now...
A few years later Adobe AGREED with this by discontinuing Flash on Android.
What reason do you suggest for them not latching onto that opportunity?
My only guess would be based on "The Innovator's Dilemma", at least roughly... so acknowledging the disruptiveness of HTML5 would imply refocusing their priorities in a mid/long-term strategic move: maybe rethinking how Flash should be used (i.e. game creation platform instead of RIAs) and buying startups involved in the disruption.
More a sane, opportunistic move for the business, rather than a judgement over the objective quality of a product.
You could say that, but then you'd be choosing to forget the fact that mobile Flash was awful from day one until it was discontinued, which was 100% of Steve Jobs' public position on Flash. Performance sucked, it was a battery hog, and it didn't interpret touch gestures correctly at all.
Who really cares what the motivation of Apple was? We're all better off with Flash never making a successful foothold in mobile. Feel free to write it off as nothing but selfish evil if you must, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a positive overall and only Apple had the balls to do it, regardless of potential motivation.
Personally, it's an environment that I was very glad to leave behind.
Flex was pretty horrible, and only started getting reasonable after Flash 10, but there was a constant conflict between the Flex team, and the Flash team (within Adobe). You could even see passive aggressive comments written in the Flex source:
"Waiting for jso-en-so (Flash Team) to FIX THIS, until then use <some horrible workaround>"
Flash and Flex just fell out of fashion. Everyone moves to now fashionable HTML5. Including myself. It is just painful to see how all the same wheels get reinvented again but now for a more inferior language on a platform that is less compatible between different browsers.
Assuming you use/used Windows. For everyone else, it's a brand new day.
Only Windows Flash devs that developed on Windows for other Windows users, never concerning themselves with OS X, Linux, Mobile, or anything else, maintain this sentiment.
Everyone else is glad Flash is dying the painful death it deserved. Interactive web content has been under the stranglehold of Flash for the last two decades. It's going to take some time to re-implement the more advanced features of Flash in a public standard, but it'll be worth it in the end.
Hell, IMO it's worth it right now. Compare the performance of that page to a full-screen flash page like Lacoste.com. On anything other than a Windows machine, the HTML5/SVG demo from Adobe runs smoother than Lacoste.com.
But back in about 2006 Flex was a clever tool
At it's heart, Adobe is a tools company. Regardless of whether or not they wanted to embrace SVG and Canvas, the fact that they are now building tools to support these standards will only make them more accessible to many more developers and non-programmers.
For digital publishing, Adobe have Dreamweaver, Muse, Edge, (part of InDesign), Flash... all linked with Creative Cloud, which allows you to publish 'to-the-web' (Great for non-technical designers).
I would hazard a guess that you work for Quark, or are an Apple-like fanboy of them, to present such a one sided argument with a fraction of the complete information.
To say Adobe is tied to Postscript unlike Quark comes across as fanboy-ism. Given adobe are heavily invested in HTML. That said the OP clarified what he means by Desktop Publishing and it makes more sense.
As an (non-paid) author for the Dutch InDesign User website and magazine I do find it funny someone might accuse me of working for Quark!
What CSS/HTML does Quark support?
From a developer's perceptive it might suck, but from a designer's perceptive it's 'good enough' and better than static PDF files like InDesign creates.
Fellow sufferer here. "looks horrible" is probably understatement. Some days "makes me want to poke my eye out" is appropriate. I have resorted to custom Stylish font replacement scripts to step around the problem.
One of my biggest gripes with [Adobe] is that for a company that tries to be an end-all be-all for designers and content creators, their application designs, splash screens, icons are all incredibly weak if not outright dated. If they don't even understand (or care) about the industry they're marketing to to do these things internally, how can I expect their tools to be the right solution?
But I wouldn't touch Reflow if Adobe Muse is anything to go by. Muse produced horribly verbose and unreadable code.
That is of course, considering the main target for the product is not me or my peers but rather non-coders... I'm always better off on my own with my big hairy hands on the keyboard typing my code.