Beleaguered Adobe pulls plug on Flash; axes 750 jobs; shares drop

“Shares of Adobe Systems tumbled Wednesday after the software maker unveiled 750 job cuts as well as a plan to stop development of its Flash player software for mobile devices,” Benjamin Pimentel reports for MarketWatch. “Adobe was down 7% to $28.27 in afternoon trading.”

“In the blog, Danny Winokur, general manager of interactive development, wrote that while Flash has ‘enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the Web by reaching beyond what browsers could do,’ HTML 5 ‘is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively,'” Pimentel reports. “Last year, Adobe’s Flash platform drew sharp criticisms from Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple Inc. AAPL -1.93% , who called the technology flawed and said it didn’t work well with Apple devices.”

Pimentel reports, “Adobe said its workforce reduction would be part of a revised strategy focused on digital media and digital marketing.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen believed his firm didn’t need Apple, the iPhone, or the iPad.

He thought wrong.

Sleep tight, Shantanu.

Related articles:
Adobe ceases development on Flash Player for mobile, refocuses efforts on HTML5 – November 9, 2011
Study: iOS users view 80% of mobile video – May 23, 2011
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was right about Adobe’s Flash – May 2, 2011
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen believes his firm doesn’t need Apple or the iPad – August 16, 2010
Steve Jobs posts rare open letter: Thoughts on Flash – April 29, 2010

34 Comments

    1. It is good! Im an android user but was never much of a mobile flash supporter.

      Flash has always sucked on mobile. Even on andriod. When it did work my phone quickly became hot in my hand.

      Good riddence

  1. Can someone now please pull together a list of news articles, headlines and quotes from the past two years from all the companies and pundants who either advertised that their “pads/phones” were better better than Apples because they would be able to run flash? I would love to read once again all the names of pundants who said all Apple was essentially foolish and backward for not supporting flash and how they would eventually fail for making such a mistake.

    I would love to see that summed up somewhere.

    1. Looking back is a waste of time. It’s time to let the Flash die-hards simply fade away into irrelevancy. Personally, I’m much happier knowing content is finally moving in the direction of a more efficient model. That’s plenty for me.

  2. so what.
    Adobe down 7%?
    that’s all?!
    it deserves to go the IBM/Microsoft way!
    such a fat glutton, so abusive to its clients, little innovation, overpriced, over bloated crap…

    ceo Shantanu Narayen did not listen to Apple’s focused advice!
    Adobe-Google, both lost their mojo a long time ago.

    too bad.
    whose NeXT?!

    1. Shantanu has blood on his hands. If he had listened to Steve Jobs’ concern 750 of Abode’s bread-winner employees would still have food on their tables. With the current recession it’s harder to find an alternative source of survival.

      Google and Android also had a hand for giving false hope to Abode.

  3. God I can’t for the content holders to begin the transitition away from Flash. Hulu, YouTube, Comedy Central, et. al., all of you bozos who bet the farm on Flash and it’s DRM schema are going to have to be much more original, now that Adobe has lost face.

    Stubborn sometimes means ignorant.

  4. I HATE Flash! I hate the way it takes over my browser without having the decency to ask if I want to view the content. I hate the way the videos auto-play on news sites without my consent. I hate the way you have to hunt around an active Flash annoyance looking for the ‘kill switch’.
    Die, Flash, die!

  5. Wow.

    So Adobe’s programmers are actually so incompetent they’re incapable of making Flash fast and efficient enough that it performs well on mobile platforms. And then instead of hiring capable programmers, Adobe decides to just axe Mobile Flash completely.

    You know… I recall that around, oh, 13 years ago, Flash would run fast and silky smooth on a 100mhz PC with no GPU whatsoever.

    Now it chokes, stutters, and crashes on smartphones with over 1ghz multicore processors and GPUs that are, alone, way faster a 100mhz PC. To the point that it’s unusable.

    It never ceases to amaze me how as technology evolves, programmers devolve. And now, in 2011, the situation seems to be so bad that if you even know what fundamental basics like pointers or arrays are, that makes you a top-tier master of programming.

    I piss on your grave, Mobile Flash. And may Adobe join you soon.

  6. “Pffft, Flash… I don’t use you no more, you run-down, used-up, device crashing resource hog!! I fart in your general direction! You mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”

  7. One of the many hilarious points here:

    Why was Flash ever used to play video in the first place? Superior video codecs existed THEN and superior video codecs exist NOW.

    IOW: Of course Adobe was going to dump Flash video. That has been obvious all along, which made their stamping little feet hissy fits all the more ridiculous.

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