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I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it
by kmeisthax 5y ago
I'm going to disagree that Jobs killed Flash. It's more like Adobe neglected and abused the Flash platform, and as part of that, they failed to actually get it working on mobile.
Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was.
Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later.
As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform.
I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.
- jldugger 5y ago>The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform. In other venues, I've seen this described as "becoming 50 percent richer by being 10 percent less greedy."
- ethbr0 5y ago90s Microsoft realized this, which is how Windows became Windows (making developers and partners lots and lots of money). And how 90s Apple decomposed, and only really turned it around by creating enough demand via consumer device market share that developers had to come back.
- blihp 5y agoAdobe had it working on mobile... arguably badly. See Flash on Android. Apple said 'no, you're not going to run that on our platform'. With Flash no longer being ubiquitous, it effectively died rather quickly after that. It can be argued that this probably would have happened anyway with Javascipt engine performance improving rapidly and web standards beginning to provide media functionality that had been missing etc. However, it was Apple who stopped them cold and greatly accelerated its demise rather than hanging in there for another decade or more.