Comment by dheavy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheavy | Hacker News Reader

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And for instance, you could say that "iOS's dislike of the technology" was nothing more than a strategic move from Apple and Jobs to win a battle of content over the channel, where the money lies, but you chose or forget to acknowledge this in your discourse; I just don't see how it is any different from MS or Adobe or any other corporation trying to do what they are supposed to do: making profit.

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.

I fully agree. I could have continued past Adobe and MS and started on the likes of Apple, but it'd have been a very long post. I considered whether the MS comment was out of context, that was my attempt at saying it goes beyond just Adobe.

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.

>the decisions have been detrimental to the Internet >population as whole

Absolutely. We're still paying the price(s) now...

Steve disliked Flash because it crashed small mobile devices and chewed system resources.

A few years later Adobe AGREED with this by discontinuing Flash on Android.

>A few years later Adobe AGREED with this >by discontinuing Flash on Android. Is this "agreement" a fact you can unambiguously prove by pointing out to some statement from an Adobe person, or is this a subjective assumption. Another subjective assumption there: company losing the game because of a disruptive product? I sure hope they acknowledge this pronto and refocus to cope with the changes!

Android was expanding more rapidly than iOS.

What reason do you suggest for them not latching onto that opportunity?

I don't know work at Adobe so I wouldn't know, really.

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.

> And for instance, you could say that "iOS's dislike of the technology" was nothing more than a strategic move from Apple and Jobs to win a battle of content over the channel

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.

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