How Adobe Can Benefit From Steve Jobs' Hatred of Flash
![How Adobe Can Benefit From Steve Jobs' Hatred of Flash [Commentary on How Adobe Can Utilize the Flash vs. HTML5 Debate to Their Advantage]](http://nexus404.com/Blog/thumbnailimages/alt/adobelogoTFTSThumb220153.jpg)
The fact that Steve Jobs isn’t a fan of Adobe’s Flash platform is no secret, hell it’s all over the news — First the iPhone didn’t support Flash and then the iPad leading many consumers to question whether or not Mr. Jobs was going crazy. Of course, Steve Jobs has responded by saying that Flash is bad for the Internet and pointing towards HTML5 as the future. Sure, you can point to the fact that Flash is on over 90% of Internet enabled devices but there’s no question that HTML5 is a much lighter platform that shares many of the same features. Not to mention the fact that as more consumers upgrade their browsers and hardware, HTML5 will see a larger and larger market penetration. But what is Adobe to do? Just throw in the towel, give up their market share and deem Apple the winner?
Well yes, and no — HTML5 is definitely going to be a big part of the future and relying on one company’s platform to do so many things is never a good thing. However, Adobe needs not to throw away their technology but instead they need to adapt and embrace the future. As more and more handset manufacturers begin to allow Flash to run on their devices, more and more online publishers begin to offer an HTML5 alternative to Flash so there is definitely a need for this embrace or Adobe is going to miss out on a valuable new market. Now, I’m no graphics designer so I’m not completely versed in the logistics behind it all but I am an avid Photoshop user and have dabbled with Dreamweaver and Flash in the past and if you’ve done the same you’ll surely know that Adobe entire lineup of software is incredibly powerful.
So now you look at this lineup and see that they have an image editor (Photoshop) a WYSIWYG HTML/CSS editor (Dreamweaver) and then of course, the Flash editor. So now if they were to take the knowledge they have accumulated over the years and adapt this to HTML5 they should easily be able to come up with an industry leading HTML5 editor. Sure, you can say just incorporate it into Dreamweaver, but it wouldn’t be that simple. After researching the topic a bit I’ve found that doing this would be partly impossible, and partly impractical. The amount of variables and new markup that comes with HTML5 would have a WYSIWYG editor with an insane amount toolbars and drop-down menus to incorporate all of HTML5s new features.
However, this is where Adobe’s extensive knowledge comes in — The company has been making these products for over 25 years now and with an employee base of over 8,500, there has to be someone over there that can figure out how to make a fully featured HTML5 editor; just think of it as a mash up between Flash and Dreamweaver.
So come on Adobe, you have what it takes and you don’t need to abandon Flash. Just take your knowledge and adapt it to the new technology because with all of the talk about HTML5, there is definitely a market for it.
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6 Comments / Add Your Response?
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The TFTS Team
Hi, Adobe’s HTML authoring tools will continue to evolve, as the various HTML browser runtimes evolve.
When you say “‘HTML5′ editor”, what specific abilities are you seeking? For instance, would you expect to draw in it, animate in it, or make it easy to specify various video options, or be mostly about markup & scripting, or…?
tx, jd/adobe
As long as Adobe delivers poorly performing cross platform apps for the Mac, Apple has no reason to cater to them.
Adobe dug this hole for them selves, they will have to climb out. One way to do this is to stop being so arrogant and presumptuous. Apple owes you nothing, Adobe. If you deliver poorly performing apps for the Mac then we Mac users will ignore you.
You chose a decade ago to climb in bed with Microsoft. Stay with your first choice and leave us Mac users alone. There is nothing you have which we can’t get better elsewhere.
@ John Dowdell
I’m saying software that would make it so developers who knew Flash would be able to utilize the same knowledge to code in HTML5.
“I’m saying software that would make it so developers who knew Flash would be able to utilize the same knowledge to code in HTML5.”
Thanks for the clarification… this wouldn’t be a personal tool for your own use then, sounds like.
Those using Flash already work in HTML, and we’ll keep tracking with them as clientside support becomes more widespread. There are many constituencies to support.
jd/adobe
Adobe’s tools are not that great – especially on the Mac. Photoshop is the best by far, but the Mac versions of the other creative tools suffer both in terms of performance and interface. Dreamweaver is really really bad and un-reliable.
Adobe should be the one who the FTC is investigating as they bought off their competition Aldus, Macromedia etc.
They sell about half their creative tools to Mac’s but they feel like ported Windows Applications. They do not support Mac specific capabilities well.
Adobe needs to get back to making great software and all their problems will fade, if not then someone will come along and take their market from them.
“…Stay with [Microsoft] and leave us Mac users alone.”
@Louis Wheeler, I can’t imagine whose life you think would be better if Adobe took your recommendation to heart.
Not many many Mac users, such as my son, who just bought a new MacBook Pro after seeing how well mine performs, and who, as the chief web designer, for a non-profit, spends half his time in Photoshop (and probably a good share of the rest in DreamWeaver and various browsers to see how his pages look.
Not Apple, whose sales would go to Windows, just as Adobe kinda suggested years ago.
And not even Adobe, many of whose users wouldn’t be upgrading, maybe trying to put up with next-best solutions such as GIMP, that I see touted occasionally.
I don’t disagree that Adobe hasn’t shown Apple much love over the years. I’ve characterized it as Adobe standing on Apple’s oxygen hose when Apple was close to death’s doorstep. Adobe’s product development, mostly Photoshop, encouraged some graphics types to switch to Windows, under the reasonable guess that PS on Windows would be the best, and maybe only version. For Adobe to encourage Flash developers that they’d be able to build iProduct apps in Flash was disingenuous, at best. They were using their own devs as pawns in the smokescreen that Flashless iPhones were Jobs’s fault.
But it’s also true that Apple has been a difficult business partner over the past few years: a couple of major changes of direction (remember Rhapsody?), a switch of CPUs and all the developer work that entailed, a roadmap that changes rather inconveniently (such as 2007, when Apple decided it that, in order to get Leopard out, it couldn’t afford the effort to fulfill its promise of 64-bit Carbon, which Adobe was counting on for CS4), less-than-really-stable OpenCL drivers, and changed methods of drawing in the sprung-out-of-nowhere Safari. All this makes engineering products for Macs more expensive and riskier.
But you don’t make a marriage better by scoring whose grievances more deserve apologies. You try to find common ground.