Guest post by Despite early successes on the Web, the latter years of Flash have been a tale of missed opportunities, writes Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister. ‘The bigger picture is that major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps. That’s long been the case on iOS and other smartphone platforms, and now it’s starting to be the norm on Windows. Each step of the way, Adobe is getting left behind,’ McAllister writes. ‘Perhaps Adobe’s biggest problem, however, is that it’s something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn’t make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?’
was giving away their dev tools by the end. OpenWatcom is included in FreeDOS.
The borland IDEs for DOS were the best in their class.
It was so disappointing to see them fade away into obscurity. Of course, it doesn’t matter how good your products are if you can’t make money off them.
They were up against MS on one side, and freeware clones like RHIDE on the other.
I can’t say I’ll miss Adobe though.
Perhaps McAllister should evaluate Flash from the last 5 years?
He’s just trolling as usual. In fact, none of the “open source developer tools” in the second link can be used to implement even a fraction of Flash functionality — and I’m saying this even though there’s very little love lost between Flash and me.
Yes, HTML5 could displace Flash, but not before the standard is actually finalized and we get a proper implementation, not Google’s, Apple’s or Mozilla’s flavor. And not before good authoring tools are available, of course.
RT.
I was wondering about that (if he was trolling or not). My suspicions are confirmed. Thank you.
Its slow, crash prone and buggy as heck. They tried to turn it into a desktop platform with Flex, right? The dev tools? The flex sdk is free, right?
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flexsdk
Flash didn’t die because they couldn’t figure out the future of computing, it died because flash sucks.
Is this really an article about Flash losing its way, or how ‘awesome’ Silverlight is? I got into tl;dr at the start of the second page because it was so offâ€topic.
Flash isn’t dying because it’s a CPU pig or bloated or whatever. It’s dying because Apple, Google, and others already have their own platforms, and they don’t want to encourage and promote the continued existence of yet another platform which pulls people away from their own. Years ago, Apple, Google, et al lacked the ability to shut Flash down because they didn’t control all of the distribution channels. Now, they do. Which means that Adobe has to go begging to each of the platform vendors for crumbs, and then whine in a public blog when it gets turned down. You can’t win a battle based on trying to shame your competitors.
Adobe tried some interesting approaches; for example, converting the Flash runtime to run (essentially) in an .EXE format — packaged with third-party app logic — which would allow third party developers to submit their apps to the various app stores. But Apple quickly figured out what they were doing, and moved to stop them.
Whatever you think of Flash, the fact of the matter is that there is a place for a kind of least-common denominator runtime which abstracts the various platform differences, and makes it possible to create a write-once, run-anywhere binary. But the owners of the walled gardens don’t want that at all. They want to lock people into their programming models. They don’t want to make it easy for you to port your code between platforms because it diminishes the value of their platform as a place to get exclusive content.
I’ll be contrarian. Flash would actually be good for the marketplace, if it were allowed to survive. But I’m guessing that it will continue to slip away over the next 5 years, until it only sees marginal use — and primarily in legacy use cases…
How many times did I pull my hairs off my head trying to install this piece of crap on Linux machines?
When they shut off the 64-bit experimental plugin for Linux, I saw how much the web was infested with this piece of crap.
All bad things have an end. Flash is one of them, and I am so glad.