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11/09/2011 @ 1:17PM |135,078 views
Adobe's Flash Surrender Proves Steve Jobs And Apple Were Right All Along With HTML5
Nigam Arora, Contributor
This article is the fifth in a series, “The Future of Apple,” designed to give investors appropriate insights on the future of the iconic company. After the passing of Steve Jobs, investors face uncertainty in shares of Apple (AAPL). Will the stock next hit $100 or $1,000?
The fifth article in this series was scheduled to provide more evidence of why patents will help Apple make billions from Google Android. In view of the breaking news on Flash, this article has taken precedence. The previously scheduled article will now be the sixth article in this series.
Flash is a multimedia platform produced by Adobe (ADBE). Flash has been the standard for adding video, interactivity, and animation to websites. It has been widely accepted that Flash enriches the web experience for the user.
Image via CrunchBase
The popularity of Flash is obvious from the following statistics produced by Adobe:
- 98% of enterprises rely on Flash Player.
- 85% of the most used sites use Flash.
- 75% of web video is viewed using Flash Player.
- 70% of web games are made in Flash.
In 2010, Steve Jobs had the courage to question the applicability of the Flash technology going forward. Jobs made waves and enemies when he banned Flash from use on all iOS devices. iOS is the operating system from Apple. Jobs was almost unanimously criticized by the industry.
Jobs took a big risk banning Flash, which also precluded users of Apple devices from seeing video and animation on most sites.
Steve Jobs championed an alternate technology called HTML5. Revisiting an open memo that Jobs wrote is instructive. Here is the memo.
Thoughts on Flash
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Open”.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
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You make the supposition that Jobs, and only Jobs, took this stance on Flash within Apple. Read his bio. You’ll see that Jobs was as much a mouthpiece for the internal wisdom of Apple as for his own ideas. Other Apple executives have looked around corners and had the courage to go against Jobs, who eventually capitulated. Steve was the mouthpiece for a very capable organization. That capability hasn’t vanished.
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Internal wisdom of Apple? Apple almost died. Surely many visionaries saw the downfall of Flash, this is a given. But without Steve Jobs it would take decades.
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Every word of Jobs speech was true. And, he admitted that iOS development depended on people actually coding for it and not flash, but flash was not open and not suited to the task. It was a crutch. It looks bad to Adobe to have to admit it now. Maybe the CW on the internet will realize it someday. LOL
Funny how all those iPad-like post-iPad ‘tablets’ hyping ‘flash’ compatibility have not sold, and iPad is 90+% of the market it literally created.
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Hello,
Jobs exhibited a rare leadership quality to go against the conventional wisdom. There are more examples in my previous article http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/10/12/tim-cooks-leadership-determines-whether-apple-hits-100-or-1000-next/
Nigam
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As an enterprise developer, nothing that Steve Jobs said makes any sense. Mine, and, the vast majority of OO developers are going to choose Actionscript/Flex over that monstrosity Hackscript/HTML 5. Is you’re only developing the most trivial page animations, or, watching a bunny jump up and down on the screen. Perhaps then, hacker script is an option. But. The other thing is, I don’t want a hardware vendor telling me what I can, and, don’t install on a device that I fully paid for. If its a Flash runtime or whatever.
Flash still gives the end user the most compelling experience that I have seen, and, it has seamless integration with a J2EE middle tier. Try debugging a 10K line HackerScript web application. Its pure hell. I know,
I have written one. -
This article is all wrong. You quote the memo verbatim but fail to grasp the meaning.
To summarize the gist of the memo devolves into the 6th and last point. Control.
The whole fight was about control of the mobile web but more importantly Apple’s platform. Steve all but said that Adobe hijacked the Apple platform years ago causing great angst to the company. And yet you fail to grasp this important fact.
Yes, issues of security and bugs and security are all true, but this has never stopped Microsoft from running the corporate desktop.
This primary issue is about control. Apple wants to control the interface to their system so they can move the platform in the direction they want when the want. They found a convenient open platform in html5 to do this and got Google to convert flash into h.264.
The fact that they were technically right is irrelevant. The battery life issue is also important as you want your mobile phone to at least be able to run a full business day without tethering.
If you notice Microsoft Windows phone 7.x also does not support flash. Neither does the blackberry tablet.
So Jobs won, but he won in sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. iOS has been the single most important mobile platform for the past few years. The web had to support Apple because that was the most important mobile platform. Even with the rise of Android would you lose access to more than 1/2 the mobile platform because you wanted to use flash? I didn’t think so.
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“Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash”
It might sound surprising, but there are so many reasons why Adobe never had a chance on mobile platforms. But they still had to try. Let me share my insight on why Adobe entered this market and how it might still redeem itself after years of failure.
One might think the whole initiative to put Macromedia Flash on mobile was devised for a single reason, to have the “mobile” box checked for investors. You can read about how it all started on Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Lite). It all started with a wrong vibe: having a “Flash Lite”-enabled phone never actually meant anything. Japan was the only market that cared about this technology. Carriers elsewhere never gave it the chance to become an App Store. For the next 6 years, Adobe tried to improve things, leading only to an increased sense of confusion among the userbase. They were left wondering, “Why does it say Flash is enabled, but there’s no Flash in the browser?”.
Let’s be honest now, have you actually TRIED using Flash on Android, the first platform to fully utilize Flash inside the browser? A year ago, some of us were excited to run Farmville on Android phones, only to find out it takes an entire minute to load and the game runs at few frames per second. “Well, it’s the first release, they are going to address it”, some of my friends told me. My reply was a resounding no.
When iPhone came out, there was much excitement around a perfect mobile browsing experience based on Safari/WebKit. However, counter-intuitive to the expectations set on the desktop, Flash was missing. It was a bold move on behalf of Apple and it clearly made sense from the standpoint of user-experience. It is impossible to leverage Flash into an underpowered platform.
The original iPhone, iPhone 3 and even the 3GS have processing power comparable to a Pentium 3 from 10 years ago that is barely able to run Flash. A web-page with five instances of Flash player had no hope of performing well. The content from each Flash player instance has to be scaled down to the confined dimensions of the mobile browser. It’s just SLOW. Apple’s move was justified and reasonable. The entire core user experience would’ve been bogged down by Flash.
As the App Store gained steam, Adobe thought that another flavor of a “Flash Lite”, AIR VM would be just right for the iOS. Apple did the right thing again by preventing a flood of crappy, slow Flash apps and games, which would not only have undermined the importance of high-quality native content, but would also have raised questions about why the iPhone was so slow running Flash. In 2011, Adobe took another shot at improving their mobile AIR VM this summer and with a lot of pressure on Apple, the floodgates for Flash applications for iPhone were opened. Six months later, we could find very little sign of Flash-developed content in Top Grossing of App Store and Android, except for some rare exceptions of non-demanding media content.
As a bold marketing move for the entire Android platform, stating “we are Flash enabled “created a lot of buzz and sparked a holywar between Apple and Google fans on the scale of “Windows vs Mac.”. Still, Android device never had anything Flash-based worthwhile running on their screens to show their iOS-touting opponents, except for some… banners and very light Flash games.
Anyway, let’s skip forward to 2011. There are 600+ types of Android handsets, hundreds of millions of mid- to high-end smartphones, just few million tablets, several CPU architectures, and a variety of resolutions, screen densities and video chips…
Yet, there’s still very little content worthy of being mentioned as produced for mobile Adobe AIR. Some companies, for instance Kongregate, made a bold move in creating their own marketplaces and establishing eco-systems for Flash developers, however they didn’t grow big enough on Android to improve the situation.
How did Adobe end up in this position? With thousands of exceptional Flash games available, Adobe ended up without their own standalone Marketplace due to… lack of content that actually works. Social and flash game developers didn’t even have access to micro-transaction support in AIR until a very late release last month, so they didn’t make the first move. Adobe didn’t attract high-quality showcase content to the mobile AIR platform either, so great developers didn’t follow. Compare that to Unity, which boasts ambitious MMO projects and has hundreds of developers on board. Adobe only started caring about high-profile titles when Angry Birds was released for Google Chrome using HTML5, showcasing a competing technology and exposing their vulnerability. In contrast to Google, Adobe doesn’t market showcase products to end-users. Their mobile showcase products are overly simplistic, i.e. games with a single object on a scrolling background. Entire effort feels like it’s not aligned with their brilliant Desktop strategy.
So what’s coming next? Another year for Adobe AIR on mobile. This time Adobe did a lot more to make sure things work, but their efforts have still fallen short. New Adobe AIR games only work on iPad 2. Android tablets… Well, did I mention that there are only a few million of those in the wild? What’s worse, all products requires a separate install of Adobe AIR “launcher”. This brings even more uncertainty of whether AIR will work fine on lower-end Android smartphones…
If Adobe is to make a difference on mobile platforms, they will have to fix AIR for both iOS and Android yet again, and play another round of catch-up game with Unity 3D on mobile. What’s worse, frustrated developers are beginning to realize that Flash doesn’t offer anything to them on mobile. In reality, it isn’t a cross-platform game engine like Unity, it’s still a slow virtual machine for a scripting language that ended up recompiling code to speed-up itself. Dozens of social game developers aren’t betting on Adobe, but develop their own native versions of mobile social games. The only hope for Adobe is high-end hardware: iPad 2, iPhone 4G and high-end Android smartphones and tablets. That’s quite a small piece of market for now, but it’ll keep growing. Will developers bet on AIR for their next project? No, they want 100% support of the devices, not just 20%.
Will HTML5 overtake Flash in the meantime? This won’t happen on Android due to hundreds of millions of phones with outdated browserst, which will remain like that FOREVER as vendors do not update old phones. A reasonable reach for HTML5 games might be on iOS through Facebook. Facebook is making certain progress there, however the battle with Apple gives them hard time increasing userbase, and frankly speaking, Facebook isn’t fond of promoting games for free.
There’s no reason for Adobe to worry about increasing HTML5 adoption on desktop as well. It’s just as fragmented by the discordant implementations of web standards and endless monthly browser updates breaking things around. The only place where HTML5 games gain traction so far is Chrome WebStore, where Google is making a major push, but that’s a totally different story,
I sincerely hope that Adobe will succeed in improving things with mobile AIR. Their upcoming Flash 11 Desktop showcase products are awesome. Unreal Engine 3, and Unity 3D export will definitely redefine desktop Flash yet again, but this has nothing to do with their mobile venture. For that, they will need strong allies at their backs. Will anyone deliver great content with Flash for Mobile?
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If there’s a way to post my comment as a guest “Contributor” post, please let me know at anatoly at ropotov dot com (Anatoly Ropotov).
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You’ve gotta feel sorry for many social game developers, they’re locked into Flash for legacy reasons and now face being stuck in a shrinking PC ghetto as my blog comments http://universal-machine.blogspot.com/2011/11/adobe-kills-mobile-flash.html
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I think the difficulty still remains for the consumer. All right, we have this bold new decision not to support Flash. What’s the alternative? So much software, existing websites, etc. use Flash. In fact, I’d say my iPad would triple in value for me, personally, given what I like to do, if it supported Flash (even if it was slow and even if the average actionscript is full of logical memory leaks as it is which also happens to be the case with Java). I don’t see any movement to support an alternative. Is Apple planning to support Unity? Probably not, that’s based on Microsoft’s C#.
“3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”
I’m not against the decision but where’s our shiny replacement and the support for new standards? Do I have to wait a decade for HTML5 to be embraced by all web content developers?
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It’s also worth noting that HTML5 does not replace Flash as HTML5 cannot be used to create interactive web content. That’s JavaScript and, in lesser part, CSS3. So people who think Apple was right is basically saying client-side scripts in JavaScript under existing implementations are better than ActionScript and Flash. That would be insane, but I don’t think people repeating Apple’s statements really understand what’s being compared.
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In May 2010 I wrote on my blog about it http://bit.ly/vBrRSM. I was then very upset and dissapointed about Adobe luck of vision and underestimarion of the future mobile scenario.
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There is still a huge amount of users, who shop online and use IE8. Ecommerce sites will still deliver interactive Flash content to those customers.
Flash still outperforms html5 with visual effects. Take for example, a water ripple effect. You can develop that in html5, however the effect is so slow and not usable for fast loading sites – html5 doesn’t have the hardware acceleration that Flash can harness.
As for mobile, I agree that Flash shouldn’t be used. It wasn’t initially developed to work on mobile. Adobe tried to force it to work but that proved to be a difficult task that wasn’t worth it.
To say Flash is killed off is wrong. Flash doesn’t work on mobile: true. There are still many customers that still shop using desktop browsers that don’t support html5. Those users see Flash video / interactive content for a long time.
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There is still a huge amount of users, who shop online and use IE8. Ecommerce sites will still deliver interactive Flash content to those customers.
Flash still outperforms html5 with visual effects. Take for example, a water ripple effect. You can develop that in html5, however the effect is so slow and not usable for fast loading sites – html5 doesn’t have the hardware acceleration that Flash can harness.
As for mobile, I agree that Flash shouldn’t be used. It wasn’t initially developed to work on mobile. Adobe tried to force it to work but that proved to be a difficult task that wasn’t worth it.
To say Flash is killed off is wrong. Flash doesn’t work on mobile: true. There are still many customers that still shop using desktop browsers that don’t support html5. Those users see Flash video / interactive content for a long time.
I’m not stuck on Flash or anything. I do enjoy developing content, video, and games with Flash- it’s fun working on that Flash Platform. However like with all technologies, I see them as a tool for my toolbox.
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Steve didn’t win, it wasn’t a war. Adobe ditched Flash because they themselves are moving to HTML5 based tools and AIR. Flash is being re-purposed for fully fledged demanding productive Applications with in the cloud space, something that clashes with the goals of the lightweight, fast and small deployments that smartphones would want.
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Does that mean Adobe will stop developing/enhancing flash to be more secure…or even develop for iOS?
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Apples products are also 100% proprietary. What a hypocrite SJ is. Plus, Apple screws the developers of the world at every chance it gets. For instance. The new
XCode versions 4.3, will only run on Lion/Mountain Lion, well, guess what, in order to have Lion/ML you have to have a Mac Pro 2008 or newer. Guess what those cost in at
$2500.00 +. For a smaller development shop its pure BS. I don’t see where anything Apple is open source. -
Flash has always been nothing but problems, problems, problems… I’ve been online since the early 90s and i just can’t tell you how many times i’ve had to reboot because of flash (many of the times resorting to *unplugging the computer* which is pretty bad) and that was on PCs…I know that it was even worse on Apples and others.
And the number of security problems have been legion too…Flash should never have been widely adopted, but for some reason the much more useful Java never could get a solid foothold…Java could have been so great, but Sun just couldn’t afford (or chose not to) to get it quite together…and Microsoft just sabotaged them at a crucial time. So the web made it to now with no good way to have real interactivity and animations….crazy. and sad.
