“Segue to 2007. Apple introduces the iPhone without support for Flash. People complain, but iPhones sell at ever-increasing rates. Today, with some 40 million of them around the world, and the iPad on the immediate horizon, Steve Jobs has made it quite clear that Flash is the floppy drive of the 21st century,” Steinberg writes. “It’s time for it to go.”
“As tens of millions of additional customers acquire Apple’s mobile products, the number of visitors to Flash-based sites will also decline, which pretty much forces the issue. Web developers must either build two versions of their sites to accommodate the different requirements of their potential visitors, or just set Flash aside and try to work within open Web standards,” Steinberg writes. “That may be happening. Google is beta testing an alternative to YouTube without Flash, and just this week Virgin America, a small airline, decided to drop Flash from its site. In the Macworld article reporting on the change, writer Dan Moren concludes, ‘Because, as we know, all it really takes in the corporate world is one executive with an iPhone to ask why she can’t use the company’s site on her device.'”
Steinberg writes, “As has already been mentioned, even if Flash runs with decent performance, and even if it doesn’t hog system resources or compromise stability, that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to magically access all or most Flash sites on your smartphone. Flash is designed to work with regular personal computers that have conventional input devices [not] multitouch… As a result, Web developers might begin to look for the free, open source alternatives to Flash that don’t require paying fees for Adobe’s products.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote just this past Tuesday, “Smart companies don’t exclude potential customers who have the most disposable income. You want to cater to the type of people who buy Windows PCs based on lowest possible sticker price and who are much more likely to steal software, music, and movies? Or do you want customers who have been proven to spend money for quality, who understand true value, and who are much more likely to pay for software, music and movies? Your choice.”
Please see:
• Apple Mac owns 90% market share for ‘premium’ PCs costing over $1,000 with $499 iPad coming soon – February 01, 2010
• iPhone owners more likely to pay for digital content – November 26, 2009
• Apple iPhone users buy many more apps, surf the Web much more than other ‘smartphone’ users – March 27, 2009
• NPD: Mac users significantly more likely to pay for music than Windows PC owners [updated] – December 19, 2007
• Study shows iPod owners significantly less likely to steal music than the average person – January 13, 2006
MacDailyNews Note: Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
Virgin America site here
http://www.virginamerica.com/va/home.do
Click the map, it’s Flash. Long way to go if you can’t find one big site.
I won’t miss Flash. May it rest in peace.
theOnion.com was my main usage for Flash.
now they offer their finest news as podcasts!
No Flash!!! What am I going to do with my old grey raincoat with no buttons?
For perspective remember that Apple sells 90% of all US retail computers costing more than 1,000. Any advertiser that ignores Apple customers does so at their own peril.
Apple should make sure that every CEO in America and beyond knows this fact. At the same time they are driving home this simple fact they can state that to be compatible with the entire line of Apple’s category leading CE devices they had better leave behind legacy web tools for open web standards.
Never really cared for flash in the begining to now. It always crashed my pc and ain’t worth shit to my mac and iPhone soon iPad. I’ve been waiting for the day something would knock flash off it’s pedastool and give it a boot out and HTML5 is doing a pretty good job.
Web standards are very very important and adobe doesn’t want to let go of it’s strangle. Don’t be surprised if adobe & Microsoft join forces. I know silverlight is out there but that is shit too. Combine the two efforts and you just only have one pile of shit stinking up the place than two.
Adobe and Microsoft will never join forces – each is too stubborn to let the other have any input. These companies are two dinosaurs headed for extinction. Adobe faces smaller, more agile competitors for its flagship products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat), and Microsoft can’t give its customers a good reason to upgrade their current Office or Windows product except by cutting off support.
It will be an interesting next 5 years to see what happens to these two software behemoths.
Adobe should let flash go. They didn’t develop it, Macromedia did. It has had it’s day, but isn’t going to come along in the ultimate evolution of mobile computing. Out of respect for the absorption and extinction of Macromedia, which was in the process of kicking Adobe’s ass on most of it’s core software packages, Adobe should just put it to rest (in peace.) But, they’ll probably be like MS, and hang on to obsolete technology until their very last breath.
If Apple forces out Adobe’s Flash, I hope there’ll be no retribution from Adobe regarding Creative Suite’s future editions for the Mac. However I feel about Flash, I absolutely would hate for Adobe to start favoring PCs over Macs again with their other flagship software.
Since the iPad was announced, we have been hearing a lot of noise about Flash. Most of it seems to imply, hope, expect, or forecast, that it’s going away.
I have no doubt that there have been many high-level meetings of senior management at Adobe over this. It will be very interesting to see in which direction Adobe goes from here. A smart company might place bets on both sides. On the one hand, forcefully re-engineer Flash to make it lean and fast, as well as provide consistent, easy to use and effective tools for implementing multi-touch for touch-enabled devices. On the other hand, starting developing a new set of GUI development tools for delivering interactive, multi-media content using open standards (AJAX, CSS, HTML5…). Cover their bases. If Apple continues to stubbornly refuse Flash on their mobile devices, Adobe would offer a tool to develop similar content for those devices. For all others, the “new and improved” flash would make it harder for content developers to abandon Flash for a set of technologies that is arguably more difficult to work with.
Flash also discriminates against disabled people:
http://www.flashsucks.org
@McIntosh
I would argue that Adobe’s been treating Mac customers like shit for a few years now
Apple should just buy QuarkXpress and Package it with Aperture and maybe upgrade McDraw & McPaint into a creative suite to compete with Adobe. That would rock.
Die, Macromedia, die!!!!
You won’t be missed. Flash is directly responsible for ruining the web experience, replacing content with distraction.
Regarding the Virgin America web site – it has a large rotating billboard on it’s front page.
What technology is that?
……..In the Macworld article reporting on the change, writer Dan Moren concludes, ‘Because, as we know, all it really takes in the corporate world is one executive with an iPhone to ask why she can’t use the company’s site on her device………….
Interesting writing using she rather than the default he when describing corporate executives. Another sign we are advancing as a race?
@ bizlaw
I don’t know if there are “better” programs out there than Creative Suite. Certainly Photoshop, bloated though it may be, is the gold standard for raster editing. InDesign has thankfully put godforsaken Quark into the background, and Illustrator is more or less the only program I’ve ever known as a professional grade vector drawing program outside of AutoCAD. Bridge is awesome as a creative asset management tool. But what makes CS great is the fact that its components work so well together now. I’ve spent too long learning this world to do over again.
I think regardless of what Adobe thinks of Jobs and his push against Flash, they know they have a virtually guaranteed source of revenue and users in the Mac community for CS and they’ll treat them right.
@Meh…
“…knock flash off it’s pedastool…”
And perhaps also its pedastal.
@ Toonces
If Adobe has been mistreating the Mac community regarding CS, I don’t think I’ve noticed it. But then again, I’ve only been using CS programs since 2006 and don’t know much about the CS/Mac community history. Maybe I should look into that a little more.
@McIntosh
Please no! I abandon Quark years ago and it is painful to work in every time I open an old document.
I just wish Adobe would drop its Flash focus and add better support for some of Acrobats advanced features in InDesign and Illustrator.
@ Toonces
Adobe has had many Windows only functions in multiple versions of CS. It has also been vary slow to update (re-write) much of its bloated outdated code to take advantage of advances in OSX. Adobe also dropped FrameMaker for the Mac.
That being said InDesign is the best layout tool I have used in my over 20 year design career.
Methinks Apple’s not killing flash so much as hastening its demise.
Fix that headline!
Apple’s = belongs to Apple
@Rook,
CSS and JavaScript. Not Flash.
Thumbs-up, Virgin America. Flash does NOT need to be on an airline’s public-facing site. There is no good reason for it.
Flash does have important and critical applications, but NOT the web at large, and DEFINITELY NOT on a marketing/PR/sales-oriented site that doesn’t have directly to do with interactive media.
Thank you, Apple for shepherding the industry in the right direction on this issue.
Into a world of persistent ignorance and recalcitrant superstition comes Steve Jobs. Where others clung to green lines of code on black screens, his company had a mouse and GUI. Where there were floppy disks, he moved to optical. Where there was beige, his company brought colors and metals. In a world of CRTs he converted all his products to flat screens. As others insisted on physical keyboards on phones, he introduced a virtual one. Now html5 instead of flash. One more visionary stroke in a persistently ignorant world. Incidentally, along with all authentic scientists, Jobs is certain of the facts of evolution and global warming.