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I take it you have a fairly negative opinion of Flash. That's okay by me, since I do too. Anyway, would you ever work on that project? I sure wouldn't, becau

I take it you have a fairly negative opinion of Flash. That's okay by me, since I do too. Anyway, would you ever work on that project? I sure wouldn't, because it would look like a horrible black mark on my resume. Some projects are bad enough to where it leaves a stink on the people who touch it. Once a project gets to that point, who can you hire to work on it? I'm guessing you're not going to get the best and the brightest. So, you get whoever's left. I think you can see where this is going. I call this cycle "The Bozo Loop".

jrockway 14y ago
Interesting theory. My theory is that Flash doesn't make Adobe any money, so they don't have any resources working on it. I'd happily work on Flash if it was a Google product, for example. I don't think it's a black mark, but if it was, I would just say, "Oh, I optimized a virtual machine for running lightweight dynamic languages" or something that's not obviously "I designed the Macromedia Flash Plugin". (But I wouldn't want to work for Adobe, even though they do have some successful products.)
- ahoge 14y ago
  >My theory is that Flash doesn't make Adobe any money They would have dropped it like a hot potato if that would have been the case. They make money with the fairly expensive authoring tool.
  - chipsy 14y ago
    I think there's a mix of bad mojo all around for the Flash player: -It's a quite old codebase at this point(approaching 20 years) -There's a huge amount of backwards compatibility expected - 11 major versions and counting -The technology is not easily tamed - it's a whole suite of formats and protocols integrated together, each one of which has its own complexities. -There's proprietary codecs in there, an open source player would be more expensive to support and reduce some strategy flexibility...which ties in with the last point... -It's not the center of attention because historically the tool is making the real money, as parent states. Adobe can still share plenty of blame for this, though. Even though they're in a monopoly position with most of their products, they are hesitant to make sweeping changes that can comprehensively address new needs - they opt to keep piling on features as long as possible and that is helping to contribute to exploitable bugs in both Acrobat and Flash. Even Photoshop has exploits, though they're less devastating since only some users frequently open PSD files.

jrockway 14y ago

Interesting theory. My theory is that Flash doesn't make Adobe any money, so they don't have any resources working on it. I'd happily work on Flash if it was a Google product, for example. I don't think it's a black mark, but if it was, I would just say, "Oh, I optimized a virtual machine for running lightweight dynamic languages" or something that's not obviously "I designed the Macromedia Flash Plugin". (But I wouldn't want to work for Adobe, even though they do have some successful products.)

ahoge 14y ago
>My theory is that Flash doesn't make Adobe any money They would have dropped it like a hot potato if that would have been the case. They make money with the fairly expensive authoring tool.
- chipsy 14y ago
  I think there's a mix of bad mojo all around for the Flash player: -It's a quite old codebase at this point(approaching 20 years) -There's a huge amount of backwards compatibility expected - 11 major versions and counting -The technology is not easily tamed - it's a whole suite of formats and protocols integrated together, each one of which has its own complexities. -There's proprietary codecs in there, an open source player would be more expensive to support and reduce some strategy flexibility...which ties in with the last point... -It's not the center of attention because historically the tool is making the real money, as parent states. Adobe can still share plenty of blame for this, though. Even though they're in a monopoly position with most of their products, they are hesitant to make sweeping changes that can comprehensively address new needs - they opt to keep piling on features as long as possible and that is helping to contribute to exploitable bugs in both Acrobat and Flash. Even Photoshop has exploits, though they're less devastating since only some users frequently open PSD files.