5 ms·

I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting numb

I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse.

willio58 4y ago
To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept. Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  > To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful. This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    > Open source the Flash Player code This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch). All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so. That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."
    - blooalien 4y ago
      And yet there exist open source Flash renderers [0] to this day which can render much of that old Flash content with little to no issues. Kinda sad that multiple other folks could each independently accomplish what Adobe themselves could not. [0]: https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-player/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-player/?license=ope...
    - frognumber 4y ago
      The major reason I don't use Adobe is lack of trust in Adobe. I want my files to work next year, and in 10 years. That's also why I don't use anything B2B from Google, and avoid Oracle (who doesn't break products the same way as Adobe and Google, but tends to milk cash cows in unpleasant ways). The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on unrelated product lines down-the-line.
    - None4U 4y ago
      Amazon managed to do it with CryEngine
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      I don't know how easy it'd be, though it would certainly be possible for Adobe. And something not being easy is not really a reason for it to not happen, especially when the alternative is complete death of the product. But that isn't the point though since the question was what was expected them to do, not how easy that would be.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
dylan604 4y ago
If you're tea leaf reading skills were so underdeveloped to not see that Flash was doomed, then that's kind of on you to get better. Flash was being berated everywhere about its problems, yet it was still being pushed because it was the thing. Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
- blooalien 4y ago
  > "Write once, deploy anywhere" … anywhere Adobe deems acceptable, that is.
cush 4y ago
Is the market for flash devs really that different than similar software? I highly doubt those Flash devs ended up on the street. Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
Comevius 4y ago
Adobe Flash was killed by smartphones and HTML5, but Harman still offers support for it. https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe "wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse" The world keeps changing, it's on you for putting all your money on a horse that was obviously not going to make it.
xbar 4y ago
I think you are smart.
jarjoura 4y ago
Flash was a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. I don't think the team that worked on it foresaw the rapid shift to touchscreen mobile devices. Even so, there's no way Adobe could have competed with Apple and Google's push towards Javascript and HTML5 during those two companies early WebKit collaboration. I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
enlyth 4y ago
I will never give Adobe a penny again in my life after going through their abysmal cancellation process littered with dark patterns and manipulation for one of their subscriptions, on top of being charged a fee to cancel.
- finfinfin 4y ago
  I contested the cancellation fee in PayPal and Adobe didn’t bother to respond, so the case was auto-resolved in my favor. Since then I switched to PixelmatorPro and it works for all my needs.

willio58 4y ago

To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept. Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
badsectoracula 4y ago
> To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful. This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  > Open source the Flash Player code This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch). All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so. That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."
  - blooalien 4y ago
    And yet there exist open source Flash renderers [0] to this day which can render much of that old Flash content with little to no issues. Kinda sad that multiple other folks could each independently accomplish what Adobe themselves could not. [0]: https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-player/?license=opensource https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-player/?license=ope...
  - frognumber 4y ago
    The major reason I don't use Adobe is lack of trust in Adobe. I want my files to work next year, and in 10 years. That's also why I don't use anything B2B from Google, and avoid Oracle (who doesn't break products the same way as Adobe and Google, but tends to milk cash cows in unpleasant ways). The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on unrelated product lines down-the-line.
  - None4U 4y ago
    Amazon managed to do it with CryEngine
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    I don't know how easy it'd be, though it would certainly be possible for Adobe. And something not being easy is not really a reason for it to not happen, especially when the alternative is complete death of the product. But that isn't the point though since the question was what was expected them to do, not how easy that would be.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

dylan604 4y ago

If you're tea leaf reading skills were so underdeveloped to not see that Flash was doomed, then that's kind of on you to get better. Flash was being berated everywhere about its problems, yet it was still being pushed because it was the thing. Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.

blooalien 4y ago
> "Write once, deploy anywhere" … anywhere Adobe deems acceptable, that is.

cush 4y ago

Is the market for flash devs really that different than similar software? I highly doubt those Flash devs ended up on the street. Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.

Comevius 4y ago

Adobe Flash was killed by smartphones and HTML5, but Harman still offers support for it. https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe "wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse" The world keeps changing, it's on you for putting all your money on a horse that was obviously not going to make it.

xbar 4y ago

I think you are smart.

jarjoura 4y ago

Flash was a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. I don't think the team that worked on it foresaw the rapid shift to touchscreen mobile devices. Even so, there's no way Adobe could have competed with Apple and Google's push towards Javascript and HTML5 during those two companies early WebKit collaboration. I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.

enlyth 4y ago

I will never give Adobe a penny again in my life after going through their abysmal cancellation process littered with dark patterns and manipulation for one of their subscriptions, on top of being charged a fee to cancel.

finfinfin 4y ago
I contested the cancellation fee in PayPal and Adobe didn’t bother to respond, so the case was auto-resolved in my favor. Since then I switched to PixelmatorPro and it works for all my needs.