Jhonsa writes, “I think that HTML5 does amount to a real threat to Adobe over the long-term. But all the same, I think anyone expecting it to do serious damage to Flash’s market position over the next couple of years is in for a serious disappointment, for three reasons.”
MacDailyNews Take: Nobody in their right mind thinks Flash will be abandoned over the next couple of years. But, its use will diminish if Apple continues to release products that sell in the tens of millions annually and that do not support Flash. The fact is that Apple’s market share is dominating among people who have meaningful discretionary income and who’ve proven they’ll spend it. This means that if you want your videos, websites, and ads seen and used by people with money to spend and the will to spend it, then you must stop using Flash. Have a nice afternoon, Adobe execs.
Jhonsa’s three reasons:
1. HTML5 is a work in progress
2. Licensing issues remain thorny
3. Old browsers die hard: There are just going to be far too many users out there running older web browsers that don’t support HTML5
MacDailyNews Take: #1 is obvious; and, by the way, everything is a work in progress, #2 is overblown (not nearly as “thorny” as Jhonsa attempts to make the issues out to be, and #3 gets fixed as soon as the luddites start hitting things they really want to see, but can’t. Time to download a new/update your old browser. (And, yes, Jobs should set up a shell company to buy major porn sites and switch them from Flash to HTML5, if he wants to hasten the Flash’s inevitable decline.)
Jhonsa continues, “A day will come when Adobe’s Flash business faces a credible challenge from the adoption of HTML5. But there’s no need for Adobe investors to act as if that day is just around the corner.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you’re an Adobe investor, you’ve got more problems than worrying about where Flash is going: 48 months ago, a share of Adobe (ADBE) went for around $43; today it’s just $35.
MacDailyNews Note: Note to advertisers (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting iPod touch users. And, very soon, iPad users won’t be seeing them, either. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.
Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Ask CNBC to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• 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.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “iWill” for the heads up.]
Well, HTML5 is definitely a work in progress: I had to switch back to Flash-driven YouTube after having so many videos not run while using its HTML5 engine, it was just too frustrating.
I don’t think HTML5 will be officially ratified until at least next year, so it still has a way to go before becoming a stable platform to work on. Apple pressure is helping to move things along, but it’s more wishful thinking than reality at this point.
Adobe’s stock will go up when the CS5 is announced this spring. Every graphics Mac professional will be looking for 64 bit support and that is the promis of CS5.
I know everyone else is beleaguered, but perhaps its time to start calling Apple, “embattled.”
I know Steve Jobs is a genius but seriously, dude needs to chill. Keep hatching the diabolically cool plans and stuff, but maybe stfu a bit criticizing everyone else in public.
Sales 101, don’t criticize the competition. Compliment them, then talk about how great you are in comparison.
No need to call Adobe lazy. No deed act like Google just took your best rattle away from you. Sue to protect your IP, but stfu about it.
Someone should change all his passwords to “chillax.”
CS5 will not be released this spring, this is Adobe, after all. Adobe indicated that it would be released in April, which in Adobe time would mean next November or so, if we’re lucky.
I will never buy anything from Adobe anymore.
Adobe is locked in the 90s. Asleep. They will slowly fade away.
Anyone who does major business online, from Amazon to Zappos and in between will very soon call some strategic C-level meetings to evaluate their online content in light of the powerful emerging web-browsing platform that is completely Flash-less. While mobile surfing on the iPhone/iPod devices has been significant compared to all other mobile devices, it has been fairly negligible within the context of desktop devices. In addition, the kind of mobile surfing is different than on desktop. Women tend to buy a lot of their clothing/accessories/cosmetics online, but they find it difficult on a pocket device. However, iPad will be perfect for such task. Thus, iPad’s share in web traffic of these sites will quickly begin showing on their radars.
Regardless of the stability of HTML5 today, these online businesses will very soon be facing a serious strategic challenge: invest serious money in re-engineering the entire site around Flash, or give up on a rather minimal, but steadily growing percentage of revenue/profits from users who don’t do Flash.
Since greed is the primary motivator of any and every business, the equation will be very clear here. And Flash will go, little by little, into the specialised niche, where it was originally supposed to go.
“3. Old browsers die hard: There are just going to be far too many users out there running older web browsers that don’t support HTML5”
This one is funny. HTML5 advocates have nothing to fear from this group, they are the cheapest of online users. They spend less on the internet than do owners of Macs, iPods and iPhones.
Among online retailers their ideal customer is those described above. They earn more and spend more than any other online demographic, ands their browser relies on HTML5.
Apple have been 64 bit since powerpc… It is pitiful to watch an adobe product launch on 16 core(hyper threaded) mac pro! I think Adobe have missed the corner and are heading across the fields….
Bad mouth Flash if you want, but it brought animation to the masses. Until Adobe bought it, it was a viable product.
Adobe hasn’t worked well or played well with the Mac platform since the rollout of OS X, the fact that Flash works better on PC’s either means that Adobe wants to to screw Mac users or that they’re incapable of building a solid product.
@theloniousMac
Totally agree. However, I don’t see the “politcal type” jabs/negativity stopping anytime soon. Afterall, Apple’s entire television ad campaign is based off of negative propaganda with it’s apple vs Pc commercials. I have always hated that type of ad. Win your customers by the merits of your work, not the negative bashing of your competitor. As MDN likes to point out regularly. Mac users are “smarter and have more money to spend”. Don’t you think those people are smart enough not to need those ads? Also, I find it extrememly amusing that MDN, with it’s continued childish and immature comments, to be the one constantly patting itself on the back as the “smart ones with disposable income”.
Wears me out. Yet, I do like to read the articles. I’ll leave the commentary to the rich lemmings.
Adobe Investors should be more concerned about how long Adobe takes to fix security issues and how Adobe refuses to make Flash perform as well on Macs as it does on Windows.
@Andreeccm
you say “Apple’s entire television ad campaign is based off of negative propaganda with it’s apple vs Pc commercials”
huh?
Msft’s ‘Lauren cheap Pc’ ads etc bashed Apple products, showed real macs right on the screen , the Mac PC ads used humor. Even worse Msft. lied in their ads when price comparisons, using previous generation and old prices, they finally removed the mac pricing segments when Apple threatened to sue. What about that?
And this “Apple’s entire television ad campaign “. Entire? The vast majority of iPhone, iPod ads are just ads showing features like Apps, music etc. Ever see an iPhone OS ad mention Android? Compare that to the Droids “iPhone Misfit toy commercials” and all those “Droid does iPhone doesn’t”, Verizon and Motorola spent a 100 million bucks those negative ads.
And this article by the way deals more with flash on Phones, iPads not Mac PC (flash works on macs) so iPhone ads vs Droid ads fit better than your Mac PC ad comparison.
First off, Flash IS NOT going away just because MDN thinks it should. Also, painting Adobe as a bunch of near-sighted idiots is just plain asinine. Do we really have to listen to ‘kill flash kill flash’ for the next 3 years? I prefer to think for myself, thanks anyway.
TheloniousMac has is right.
I don’t mind the ‘rah rah Apple’ but how can every other company be incompetent, dumb, ‘beleaguered’, monopolistic fools?
Is this reality? Of course it isn’t.
Adobe has not ‘lost its way’ at all, they just have technological friction with another tech company. How does that make them doomed?
I’ll be honest, Flash works just fine for me and not having it on the iPhone is a serious limitation for which we can’t entirely blame Adobe. I want an iPad, but my own site will not work on it, nor will dozens of others that I rely on. I will likely postpone getting one until either Apple or Adobe gets back to reality or someone finds a workaround.
If anyone has lost their way, it’s MDN for treating every company that competes with (or even has to work with) Apple as the spawn of Satan.
“And, yes, Jobs should set up a shell company to buy major porn sites and switch them from Flash to HTML5, if he wants to hasten the Flash’s inevitable decline.”
You guys are geniuses. $40 ($50?) billion will buy a lot of porn sites.
Give away free porn subscriptions with all Mac, iPhone & iPad purchases. That’s how Apple’s going to grab the last 80% share of the market.
I really liked flash when it was new, cool and there were a bunch of creative types using the animations in their sites… it was fun. Pretty useless, but fun. That was a long time ago. Now, flash is really more of an irritant. It feels too much like running an embedded app inside of a web page, and takes all the control away, as well as being non-standard and resource demanding.
I’m not really sure what it brings to the table…? Viewing video? Seems like there are plenty of alternatives, including quicktime, etc. that just play video, not take over the entire web page. I prefer content, not sizzle. Flash is fine for certain things, but not for trying to be the entire experience.
I’d be happy to not run into another flash-based site.
@Nobama
The use of Flash will decline. And it will decline rapidly once sales of the iPad push it towards the tipping point.
Adobe has been fairly unresponsive for years, starting back in the mid-1990s, once the company began focusing on Windows PCs and stopped caring as much about the Macs that made the software possible.
Not everyone that competes with Apple is the SoS. But a fair number of them act like it and some of the rest are evolving in that direction. It’s hard to believe, but Microsoft is rapidly slipping down the SoS scale from Dr. Evil to mere Monopolistic Sinner.
“(And, yes, Jobs should set up a shell company to buy major porn sites and switch them from Flash to HTML5, if he wants to hasten the Flash’s inevitable decline.)”
an alternative:
how much would it be for Apple to buy out h.264 once and for all (maybe others help?), then offer free licenses to open source browsers, then Mozilla/Firefox can use it too.
Then, in no time, 40% of browsers (FF+Chrome+Safari+Opera) support video in html.
without video, Flash will die much sooner.
Apple could take a page from Microsoft’s playbook and start playing dirty pool, like PAYING websites to ditch Flash and switch to HTML5. Think that would ruffle a few feathers over at Adobe?
@theloniousMac
Yeah, we’d all like to be above boorish behavior, but I’ve get a different take. First, most of what we’ve read attributed to SJ has been unsubstantiated third party eavesdropping on private conversations. That said, even if reported accurately, words uttered in private conversations and meetings are not the same as public criticism.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that all the bitchy quotes attributed to SJ are accurate. My take is that SJ has earned the right to call out anyone in the industry that chooses. This a guy who brought Apple into fruition (taking nothing away from Woz, but a big corporate chieftain he is not) only to be betrayed by the guy he brought in, and tossed out like a used tissue. This is a guy who clawed his way back. Regained control of the dying Apple Computer, and turned it into today’s tech juggernaut. He knows all the players in the industry far better than your or I. And as far as I can tell, he is absolutely right about Flash. Adobe has ill treated its Mac customers since the mid ’90’s. While Windows users may have filled Adobe’s coffers, it was Mac users like me that gave them their start in the 80’s. For nearly 20 years Adobe has been telling Apple that they are nothing without Adobe. It’s no wonder that Steve wants to use some of Apple’s new found clout to push Adobe to pay some respect to the Mac platform. And since I use almost every Adobe product there is, if he can get them improve the product, more power to him.
Now Flash-free, thanks to ClickToFlash. Anybody know of a Bing rollover suppressor?
Sweet, so i get to spend $500 a copy times 40 to upgrade to CS5… They should support a cheaper upgrade path
Adobe would be nothing without Apple. They are responsible for delivering all the Mac programs in a s@it version to the PC platform.
Adobe are a bunch of lazy jerks, raking in the money for doing nothing for a decade, while treating the Mac platform like the ugly step daughter.
F$&k;Adobe, you’ll never see another dime from me for your bloatware, that has not brought any innovation for about a decade.
I don’t understand the concern. I think Flash is great. It means I can browse all kinds of interesting sites without being annoyed by obnoxious ads – they all show up as goofy little Lego blocks. Advertisers – please don’t quit using flash!
@Ubermac
“Adobe are a bunch of lazy jerks, raking in the money for doing nothing for a decade, while treating the Mac platform like the ugly step daughter. “
Having used Adobe products for more than a decade and a owner of CS4 premium I have to agree. For example no 64 bit photoshop yet, using Carbon for years instead of Cocoa, dumbing down apps to be ‘equal’ to Windows versions. Steve Jobs was polite when he said they were lazy. Long time mac graphic users are mad at Adobe because we made Adobe, Illustrator etc were originally Mac only. We gave Adobe the financial strength to compete with Corel etc when they went Windows.
@Lurker. Most people use Click-to-Flash BECAUSE THEY NEED FLASH – and I suspect you do too.
… I mean, otherwise, it’s much simpler, and a more efficient use of cpu resources, just to remove the Flash Plug-In!
I use Click2Flash because I want to choose when to deal with problems of Flash, and it’s NOT for ADS! I find that I’m clicking to use Flash less and less, since most of the uses of Flash are for things which I don’t need to see.
Flash will need to go or adapt. It needs to deal with non-mouse based modes of input, and not be such a processor and power hog.
Adobe is a mud hut. Somebody’s brother lives in one in Kenya.
Using Click2Flash is just like using Bootcamp on a Mac. It’s stop gap, to help people as they transition away the crappy technology they are used to.
“Mud hut?” That kind of comment could only come from an a**hole. Wearing a white sheet. And drooling, mindlessly.
Some of the negative comments lately regarding MDN’s Apple-centric take on things are bordering on asinine. (Yes, those making the comments are free to do so, as am I free to criticize them.) The website is called MAC DAILY NEWS. At the least, what did you think you were going to get, articles raving about Microsoft? Maybe MDN is “too” pro-Apple, but I’ve spent the last 20 years having windows shoved down my throat by the media and through my daily suffering while working on archaic windows machines on the job. So, spare me the “enough about Apple” BS – it’s refreshing to have a little Macentricity. If you want neutral tech reporting, try a site without “mac” in the URL. And if you don’t pick up on the tongue-in-cheek humor, then you really are at the wrong website.
It’s interesting that everyone’s crystal ball shows them a future based on their prejudices.
Its also interesting how little the Kill Flash crowd cares about the accessibility of other people’s work. Plugin based content has been on the Web for 14 years and a lot of it is unlikely to be replaced. I’m talking about the work of educators, animators, graphic artists, cartoonists, and so on who don’t have the time or inclination to go back and redo everything.
And why should they? The Object tag is still part of HTML 5. If it isn’t supported on the iPhone OS then the iPhone OS and its mobile browser are not fully HTML 5 compliant.
Finally, did it ever occur to anyone that calling out Adobe in this way may actually help them as they ship Flash Player 10.1? Apple has turned Adobe’s work with other mobile device providers into a marketing win for Adobe and helped produce an unexpected level of cooperation between Adobe, Google, Microsoft, ARM, HTC, Intel, NVidia and others. Who would have thought that would happen a few years ago? Imagine you work at Motley Fool and you’ve heard Apple evangelists say Flash can’t work well on mobile devices. Then they see it working effectively on Android phones and on tablets from HP and Dell. Who are they going to believe?
Steve bills the iPad as the ultimate internet device…this is where the problem arises, it is not, nor can it be without supporting the millions of web sites that rely on Flash, as crappy as Flash may be, it’s extremely prevalent.
I have a 15″ macbook pro sitting on my coffee table, it is used every night by myself and my wife for simple internet browsing, I very much wanted to replace this with an iPad, I can deal with the loss of Flash, but some of her main browsing sites do not support it..
not so ultimate
damn we need an edit function, most of her websites are full flash, that nixes half of the point of me purchasing a iPad, so will probably not replace the Macbook Pro….sadly, to much machine for just web browsing
To Andreeccm,
The thing is that most people are NOT tech dudes. They listed to what ever drivel they hear and go from there.
More memory, must be good, faster processor, must be fast…. anything else is beyond them. Apple uses some class and makes the commercials fun and informative.
To Erk,
“I have a 15″ macbook pro sitting on my coffee table, it is used every night by myself and my wife for simple internet browsing,”
Yea but the MacBook plays HTML5 too. And Steves says that Flash is the cause of many system crashes. I think I can agree to that. So, sitback, enjoy the web and enjoy your iPads when they arrive.
Just a thought,
en
MDN’s comment about stock price is incorrect and somewhat foolish. 48 months ago, according to WSJ/bigcharts.com, on March 16, 2006, Adobe’s stock closed at $35.93, trading in the range 35.91-37.35 on a volume of 6,439,100 shares. This is mere pennies from where it is now.
Indeed, there was a more recent period when Adobe’s price hovered around $45, but then we had this teeny little market correction you may have read about.
In the past year, Adobe has gained about 85%, outperforming the NASDAQ composite which is up 60%.
MDN’s comment about stock price is incorrect and somewhat foolish. 48 months ago, according to WSJ/bigcharts.com, on March 16, 2006, Adobe’s stock closed at $35.93, trading in the range 35.91-37.35 on a volume of 6,439,100 shares. This is mere pennies from where it is now.
Indeed, there was a more recent period when Adobe’s price hovered around $45, but then we had this teeny little market correction you may have read about.
In the past year, Adobe has gained about 85%, outperforming the NASDAQ composite which is up 60%.
MDN’s comment about stock price is incorrect and somewhat foolish. 48 months ago, according to WSJ/bigcharts.com, on March 16, 2006, Adobe’s stock closed at $35.93, trading in the range 35.91-37.35 on a volume of 6,439,100 shares. This is mere pennies from where it is now.
Indeed, there was a more recent period when Adobe’s price hovered around $45, but then we had this teeny little market correction you may have read about.
In the past year, Adobe has gained about 85%, outperforming the NASDAQ composite which is up 60%.
MDN’s comment about stock price is incorrect and somewhat foolish. 48 months ago, according to WSJ/bigcharts.com, on March 16, 2006, Adobe’s stock closed at $35.93, trading in the range 35.91-37.35 on a volume of 6,439,100 shares. This is mere pennies from where it is now.
Indeed, there was a more recent period when Adobe’s price hovered around $45, but then we had this teeny little market correction you may have read about.
In the past year, Adobe has gained about 85%, outperforming the NASDAQ composite which is up 60%.
MDN’s comment about stock price is incorrect and somewhat foolish. 48 months ago, according to WSJ/bigcharts.com, on March 16, 2006, Adobe’s stock closed at $35.93, trading in the range 35.91-37.35 on a volume of 6,439,100 shares. This is mere pennies from where it is now.
Indeed, there was a more recent period when Adobe’s price hovered around $45, but then we had this teeny little market correction you may have read about.
In the past year, Adobe has gained about 85%, outperforming the NASDAQ composite which is up 60%.
MDN’s comment about stock price is incorrect and somewhat foolish. 48 months ago, according to WSJ/bigcharts.com, on March 16, 2006, Adobe’s stock closed at $35.93, trading in the range 35.91-37.35 on a volume of 6,439,100 shares. This is mere pennies from where it is now.
Indeed, there was a more recent period when Adobe’s price hovered around $45, but then we had this teeny little market correction you may have read about.
In the past year, Adobe has gained about 85%, outperforming the NASDAQ composite which is up 60%.