...Adobe is now reportedly planning to give its employees Android phones running Flash...Adobe reportedly has not yet decided which Android phone it will give its employees, though "various HTC phones and the Nexus One" were specifically mentioned.
Why doesn't it just give them one of the existing phones on the market that run flash?
See the Android phones have not been picked yet, do not have a version of Flash and are not being subsidized. They are being given away. Expect they will pick a model with a replaceable battery and give away spare batteries and chargers as well.
Glad to see they are going for a full test but wondering how unbiased the results will be.
Does this sound like a playground fight over toys?
Adobe sound like the kid that nobody wants to play with, because they don't play nice, throwing a fit.
Sure the market has not moved away from Flash yet, but the is the future. Adobe doesn't want the future to come and won't do what it takes to compete in the future. They are link the content providers that want things the way they always where, their way.
Steve gave them a good bone at the end of his note. Make Flash and/or Dreamweaver output HTML5. I know that would mean they actually need to work on a product rather than just maintaining it, but it would pay off. Same with Flash output to an Xcode Project rather than a lame runtime.
Makes sense. Adobe wants to develop a mobile version of flash and so needs to have a mobile phone that they can test it on. At this point only Android allows them to do so. Android will make or break mobile flash, and is adobe's last chance to get it right.
Ha!
Android break itself (and it currently is with the configuration fragmentation, and software/security issues). Adobe betting the farm on a small player (Android) in the smartphone market place isn't really an overly wise move. Good job they are counting on Symbian too (although that's going down slowly).
Basically, you're saying goodbye to Flash for Mobiles. Adobe is already 1-1.5 years late on their original promise for mobile flash, and it is fast become irrelevant, if that isn't really already the case.
Adobe is in denial of flash being on it's last leg and that will end up hurting Adobe and mobile device makers and users. All this so that Adobe can recoup their Macromedia purchase price?
They are wasting their time and money on FLASH when they should let the current tools run their course and focus on new HTML5 tools.
Steve's Open letter could not be more clear. Any company that supports using flash on their mobile device at this point shows just how much thoughtful care goes into the design of their products.
We are already seeing massive migration to HTML5 and when IE9 comes out with html5 support, the game will be over.
Time will tell.
Adobe is still in debt after acquisition of Macromedia (flash it is) so that is probably the reason not give the flash up, investors wouldn't be happy to know that such a large investment was a huge waste of money.
P.S. i a couple of years Adobe investors will not be happy when flash is dead and the market for html5 tools is not Adobe's.
This is so stupid. Even if your Adobe gives out the phone to all their employees < 9K, it isn't going to make any difference. Instead of all this negative publicity, why don't they divert their attention to fixing Flash, if that is their bread-and-butter. I think Adobe is just choking their own neck. The popularity of iPhone and iPad will make the content provider move over to updated technology. As we know Microsoft is also trying to push their Silverlight technology to compete with Flash, but I think that one will also go down, as I hear it also has similar issues.
The dogfooding will be intended to ease fears that Flash isn't (yet) ready for mobile phones. After all, what could be more embarrassing than a big chunk of your employees genuinely believing that it performs poorly, crashes all the time, is insecure? So they must be extremely confident that it is none of those things... or at least that will be the intended perception.
But in reality, people know not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and know that their employment could be in jeopardy if they grumble to external parties, and maybe even (completely against the spirit of dogfooding) internal ones. So it's one of those things that the company can, admittedly at some expense (imagine for a moment that $100 of the amount you paid for Adobe CS was going to pay for a smartphone for one of their employees), "just do" without having to worry much about negative consequences. Adobe must have many employees with Macs at least for the purpose of developing their own software... and yet, on a Mac, Flash is undoubtedly a CPU hog and is at the centre of many crashes, so those Adobe employees must be quietly accepting that rather than complaining about it.
I actually would like it if Adobe managed to get Flash 10.1 behaving well on mobile phones, because if they can get the full feature set performing well with a couple of hundred MB of RAM on a few-hundred-megahertz CPU throttled to half its clock rate to save power, then they can get the desktop versions to perform excellently, and then Flash would become a non-issue. I just have trouble believing that could be true. IMO the Flash support for Mac and Linux is purely so that they can claim that the full feature set is on all platforms, without any interest in it running well: in effect they are bundling Mac users with the Windows users they are already selling to Flash developers to sell to their clients. As long as mobile internet use isn't a significant part of the market, there's just no strong motivation for Adobe to make a Flash for it that is any more than "acceptable". For the majority part of the market, it's a bit different, as clients do not like content that performs poorly on their own machines.
I'd like to add another interesting analogy: Microsoft's Mac software. Who remembers when MSIE 5.x was the standard web browser for the Mac? Fun times. MSIE5 Mac came out in 2000; MSIE6 (Windows) in 2001; Safari came along in 2003. It was abundantly clear that IE5/Mac was not remotely comparable to IE6/Win, and I seem to recall it was a far cry from even IE5/Win. So Microsoft put all that effort into making an MSIE for the Mac, but they just weren't interested in making it all that good, and that's completely understandable because it was a freebie whose only purpose could be to slightly bolster MSIE's market share. Compare that to MS Office for the Mac which (I'm told) is actually rather good. The key difference is that Mac users pay for that directly.
In short: nobody cares about minority users who are unhappy with their freebies. All the manufacturer cares about is that they are users and so contribute to their "market share". I expect that to hold true of mobile Flash 10.1, but I hope that it doesn't.
Perhaps the one good outcome of this will be at all of Adobe will now collectively see what a resource- and battery-hogging piece of software this is on mobile phones. And, how it works (or does not) on a touch screen. Many of them will have used an iPhone before, and will be able to clearly see points of parity and difference.
As a result, who knows, they might finally come up with something that works. Or they'll finally give up, and the CEO will lose all credibility.
Looks like some one in Adobe have figure out a clever way to push their face-saving agenda onto their employees by providing the "oppotunity" to work 24 hours shifts.
What isn't reported is that Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is also supplying tricycles fitted with car batteries and dynamos so his employees can get a working days usage out of the Android.
Time for the Board to tell Shantanu to take a hike. Adobe will soon be the laughjng stock of the software segment. Shantanu has been busy shifting jobs to India while strangling the creative side of Adobe. What we need is for the founders to come back or at least be more vocal.
Instead of all this negative publicity, why don't they divert their attention to fixing Flash, if that is their bread-and-butter. I think Adobe is just choking their own neck. The popularity of iPhone and iPad will make the content provider move over to updated technology. As we know Microsoft is also trying to push their Silverlight technology to compete with Flash, but I think that one will also go down, as I hear it also has similar issues.
Flash users are their bread-and-butter; the Flash plugin is not. The users don't have to like it, they just have to have it. It's like banner ads: AppleInsider (in this case) is selling a certain amount of your field-of-view for a certain amount of time to, presumably, some kind of advert service, and they also are selling your eye-time to advertisers, then you have an advertising designer who will presumably will be trying to create a high view-to-click rate, and then the business being advertised, which really only cares about the clicks. In the same way, Adobe sell potential users to developers, developers try to convert those potential users to actual users (by making an attractive and usable interface, hopefully), and sell those actual users on to the client business. You only have to be a potential user (ie be exposed to the content but not necessarily do anything with it) as far as Adobe is concerned.
I agree that the iPad will push businesses to have web sites which are accessible without Flash (as clearly is the case for some of the iPad apps available at launch!); however, I suspect that in the case of the iPhone, although it does a very good job of not compromising on web browsing, people still think you can't get web sites rendering correctly on mobile phones (maybe just due to the small screen size) and so aren't that bothered when their site doesn't work on there because they believe the same kinds of problems will plague their non-Flash-using competition.
Silverlight is nothing but a half-hearted attempt to kill Flash, and Microsoft's motivation in that will be similar to Apple's no-Flash-in-the-App-Store stance: Microsoft do not (not AT ALL) want to find themselves in a position where most popular Windows apps are in fact Flash apps which run poorly and effectively destroy (by not making them available to users/developers) all the distinguishing selling features of the Windows platform. In previous attempts to kill a competitor's business (Netscape, Java) Microsoft started with something which was compatible and diverged from there, to considerable initial success. With Silverlight, I think they took NIH too far and failed to get a good foothold because it's not compatible with Flash at all. Because Silverlight doesn't have that big a user base (and a big user base is its main purpose), there's no motivation to put lots of money into making it better, so it wouldn't surprise me if it performs poorly.
Comments
...Adobe is now reportedly planning to give its employees Android phones running Flash...Adobe reportedly has not yet decided which Android phone it will give its employees, though "various HTC phones and the Nexus One" were specifically mentioned.
Why doesn't it just give them one of the existing phones on the market that run flash?
Oh. Never mind.
Should be lots of good Android deals on ebay coming up.
lol! You got that right on!
Glad to see they are going for a full test but wondering how unbiased the results will be.
Adobe sound like the kid that nobody wants to play with, because they don't play nice, throwing a fit.
Sure the market has not moved away from Flash yet, but the is the future. Adobe doesn't want the future to come and won't do what it takes to compete in the future. They are link the content providers that want things the way they always where, their way.
Steve gave them a good bone at the end of his note. Make Flash and/or Dreamweaver output HTML5. I know that would mean they actually need to work on a product rather than just maintaining it, but it would pay off. Same with Flash output to an Xcode Project rather than a lame runtime.
Umm? why does this help at all?
It will improve the quality of users of both Android and iPhone OS.
Makes sense. Adobe wants to develop a mobile version of flash and so needs to have a mobile phone that they can test it on. At this point only Android allows them to do so. Android will make or break mobile flash, and is adobe's last chance to get it right.
Ha!
Android break itself (and it currently is with the configuration fragmentation, and software/security issues). Adobe betting the farm on a small player (Android) in the smartphone market place isn't really an overly wise move. Good job they are counting on Symbian too (although that's going down slowly).
Basically, you're saying goodbye to Flash for Mobiles. Adobe is already 1-1.5 years late on their original promise for mobile flash, and it is fast become irrelevant, if that isn't really already the case.
Adobe is in denial of flash being on it's last leg and that will end up hurting Adobe and mobile device makers and users. All this so that Adobe can recoup their Macromedia purchase price?
They are wasting their time and money on FLASH when they should let the current tools run their course and focus on new HTML5 tools.
Steve's Open letter could not be more clear. Any company that supports using flash on their mobile device at this point shows just how much thoughtful care goes into the design of their products.
We are already seeing massive migration to HTML5 and when IE9 comes out with html5 support, the game will be over.
Time will tell.
Adobe is still in debt after acquisition of Macromedia (flash it is) so that is probably the reason not give the flash up, investors wouldn't be happy to know that such a large investment was a huge waste of money.
P.S. i a couple of years Adobe investors will not be happy when flash is dead and the market for html5 tools is not Adobe's.
But in reality, people know not to look a gift horse in the mouth, and know that their employment could be in jeopardy if they grumble to external parties, and maybe even (completely against the spirit of dogfooding) internal ones. So it's one of those things that the company can, admittedly at some expense (imagine for a moment that $100 of the amount you paid for Adobe CS was going to pay for a smartphone for one of their employees), "just do" without having to worry much about negative consequences. Adobe must have many employees with Macs at least for the purpose of developing their own software... and yet, on a Mac, Flash is undoubtedly a CPU hog and is at the centre of many crashes, so those Adobe employees must be quietly accepting that rather than complaining about it.
I actually would like it if Adobe managed to get Flash 10.1 behaving well on mobile phones, because if they can get the full feature set performing well with a couple of hundred MB of RAM on a few-hundred-megahertz CPU throttled to half its clock rate to save power, then they can get the desktop versions to perform excellently, and then Flash would become a non-issue. I just have trouble believing that could be true. IMO the Flash support for Mac and Linux is purely so that they can claim that the full feature set is on all platforms, without any interest in it running well: in effect they are bundling Mac users with the Windows users they are already selling to Flash developers to sell to their clients. As long as mobile internet use isn't a significant part of the market, there's just no strong motivation for Adobe to make a Flash for it that is any more than "acceptable". For the majority part of the market, it's a bit different, as clients do not like content that performs poorly on their own machines.
I'd like to add another interesting analogy: Microsoft's Mac software. Who remembers when MSIE 5.x was the standard web browser for the Mac? Fun times. MSIE5 Mac came out in 2000; MSIE6 (Windows) in 2001; Safari came along in 2003. It was abundantly clear that IE5/Mac was not remotely comparable to IE6/Win, and I seem to recall it was a far cry from even IE5/Win. So Microsoft put all that effort into making an MSIE for the Mac, but they just weren't interested in making it all that good, and that's completely understandable because it was a freebie whose only purpose could be to slightly bolster MSIE's market share. Compare that to MS Office for the Mac which (I'm told) is actually rather good. The key difference is that Mac users pay for that directly.
In short: nobody cares about minority users who are unhappy with their freebies. All the manufacturer cares about is that they are users and so contribute to their "market share". I expect that to hold true of mobile Flash 10.1, but I hope that it doesn't.
so they admit they don't have flash available for phones yet, just like Steve said?
Admit? The current status is well known and in the news.
As a result, who knows, they might finally come up with something that works. Or they'll finally give up, and the CEO will lose all credibility.
Instead of all this negative publicity, why don't they divert their attention to fixing Flash, if that is their bread-and-butter. I think Adobe is just choking their own neck. The popularity of iPhone and iPad will make the content provider move over to updated technology. As we know Microsoft is also trying to push their Silverlight technology to compete with Flash, but I think that one will also go down, as I hear it also has similar issues.
Flash users are their bread-and-butter; the Flash plugin is not. The users don't have to like it, they just have to have it. It's like banner ads: AppleInsider (in this case) is selling a certain amount of your field-of-view for a certain amount of time to, presumably, some kind of advert service, and they also are selling your eye-time to advertisers, then you have an advertising designer who will presumably will be trying to create a high view-to-click rate, and then the business being advertised, which really only cares about the clicks. In the same way, Adobe sell potential users to developers, developers try to convert those potential users to actual users (by making an attractive and usable interface, hopefully), and sell those actual users on to the client business. You only have to be a potential user (ie be exposed to the content but not necessarily do anything with it) as far as Adobe is concerned.
I agree that the iPad will push businesses to have web sites which are accessible without Flash (as clearly is the case for some of the iPad apps available at launch!); however, I suspect that in the case of the iPhone, although it does a very good job of not compromising on web browsing, people still think you can't get web sites rendering correctly on mobile phones (maybe just due to the small screen size) and so aren't that bothered when their site doesn't work on there because they believe the same kinds of problems will plague their non-Flash-using competition.
Silverlight is nothing but a half-hearted attempt to kill Flash, and Microsoft's motivation in that will be similar to Apple's no-Flash-in-the-App-Store stance: Microsoft do not (not AT ALL) want to find themselves in a position where most popular Windows apps are in fact Flash apps which run poorly and effectively destroy (by not making them available to users/developers) all the distinguishing selling features of the Windows platform. In previous attempts to kill a competitor's business (Netscape, Java) Microsoft started with something which was compatible and diverged from there, to considerable initial success. With Silverlight, I think they took NIH too far and failed to get a good foothold because it's not compatible with Flash at all. Because Silverlight doesn't have that big a user base (and a big user base is its main purpose), there's no motivation to put lots of money into making it better, so it wouldn't surprise me if it performs poorly.