Blogs

Punching Bag of the Month

By Vincent Chang - on 07 May 2010, 2:33pm

With his open letter, titled "Thoughts on Flash" , Steve Jobs not only dissed Adobe and its technology, but appeared to have cast the first stone in a backlash against Adobe. Microsoft was surprisingly quick to come out supporting Apple's stance (and when was the last time those two agreed on anything?), while others have chimed in with their fair share. Opera got into the act by criticizing the use of Flash for videos and even ARM, the dominant mobile phone chip designer, has blamed the lack of smartbooks in the market on delays in Flash optimization, which was among the issues raised by Jobs' letter. Meanwhile, the Free Software Foundation predictably came out swinging at both Apple and Adobe for the closed nature of their platforms.

Hating on Flash is clearly the trending topic at the moment. Protip - Apple becoming the big bad wolf of the tech industry is the next. Anyway, there wasn't much that Adobe could do in terms of fighting the negative PR. Even the stanchest defender of Flash on forums will typically preface his/her opinion by saying in some form or another, that "HTML5 is the future". Adobe's CEO and CTO have both responded but since Adobe is getting locked out of Apple's mobile platform regardless of what they said, there's nothing much the company can do, besides switching allegiance to Android and promising to get Flash working properly on that platform.

Of course, showing off your technology working is a first step and these demonstrations of Flash on Tegra 2 should help, a little. With Intel recently announcing its own ARM competitor, the new Atom series, Moorestown, it should be good opportunity for Adobe to show that it's not its software but the hardware that's causing poor Flash performance. Finally, if you really think that Flash is disappearing from the web in the next couple of years, I'm willing to take that bet.

Vincent Chang

Vincent Chang / Former Senior Tech Writer

Vincent has written enough about tech to know that he doesn't know enough about tech. But that's not keeping him from going jargon-heavy about processors and mobos. After all, "you can't stop the signal".

Join HWZ's Telegram channel here and catch all the latest tech news!
Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.