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Comment by OliC | Hacker News Reader

Why didn't this come out of Adobe a year ago?

Adobe Edge Animate is their answer to animation in HTML 5 (not the same thing as an non-native SWF player like Shumway, but a direction they're obviously headed). Did some hands on with the early betas back at Adobe MAX 2011 - kinda felt like Flash 4 or 5 (admittedly I'm not a Flash guy, but have only played with it in the past)

Why would Adobe do something like this? It costs them money and it doesn't improve their position (and IMO, their goals) at all.

From where does Adobe get money from Flash? It isn't through the Flash Player plugins (which are already free), but it does get money from tools that create Flash content. So why wouldn't it make sense for Adobe to have made a move like this?

Because is smarter to invest in developing a new tool to create HTML5 content than to invest in a tool that converts the deprecated flash to HTML5.

Smarter for whom? Adobe? It's in their interest to keep the 'depreciated' Flash going as long as possible, whilst it still makes them money.

It actually still makes them money. The Flash authoring environment is still one of the more popular methods of doing production-quality animation. See http://coldhardflash.com for lots of examples.

The Flash authoring environment is the best vector graphics editor I've used, even without the animation and scripting on top. They're still going to continue that, even if the Flash Player plugin is a bit behind.

"It actually still makes them money." That was what I was saying.

Because Adobe has long been profiting greatly from their proprietary Flash player and other related software. Had the Flash format been a free standard and Flash player had no restriction on reverse engineering we would have had free Flash players for a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#SwfDec

Adobe actually made their Flash money from tooling and supporting services.

If they open sourced the spec and turned it into a commitie it would be in the same mess as HTML 5 and lose it's advantages (fast development, adoption for example).

It suffers from the biggest disadvantage of all: being proprietary. Flash is a massive wart on the free web.

That's a double edged sword, proprietary software moves much much faster which is why plugins like flash came about. They plugged the gaps required that the web working groups couldn't agree on.

If proprietary was such a big disadvantage why would it exist at all?

It's a disadvantage for the user, and an advantage for the business. The user is the one that matters here.

Was it a disadvantage for all those people who got to play great games or watch video on the web for years before HTML 5 added the canvas or video tag? Would we have half the features in HTML 5 if they hadn't been proved by plugins or implemented as experimental by proprietary browsers?

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