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I agree with everything, except that I think Flash is also a great product. FutureSplash Animator (oh, those were the days) was a revolutionary product that ble

by seldo 17y ago

I agree with everything, except that I think Flash is also a great product. FutureSplash Animator (oh, those were the days) was a revolutionary product that blew the crap out of the only other web multimedia solution at the time (which was Shockwave). It was vector based (truly revolutionary in 1996!), small, fast even on computers of the time. Even after the acquisition by Macromedia, the introduction of simple video streaming to Flash completely changed the economics and hence the popularity of online video, which produced YouTube, Hulu, and other game-changer online companies. Since the second acquisition (by Adobe), Flash has been buried under the mountain of bullshit you've mentioned, but Flash was and is a great product, as evidenced by its ubiquity -- 98% of desktops in the world have Flash installed, more than have Microsoft Windows. Pretty amazing stuff.

bonaldi 17y ago
There are a lot of great products in the Adobe stable -- Photoshop defined an industry, InDesign has redefined one, PDF revolutionised a lot of things (storming barricades put up by Postscript, which is also an Adobe product). The problem is that Adobe's dreadful stewardship means they all go to bloatware shit in the end. Flash may have been a great product, but it certainly isn't anymore. And its ubiquity simply shows the popularity of things people have done with it -- video being the big driver -- and doesn't prove that it is "great", any more than the number of Windows seats prove its greatness. The Flash runtime on the Mac is so poor that even their Flash PR-blogger suggests you get a flashblocker (there are also rumours that ClickToFlash was originally an inside job -- thanks for taking pity on us!) to deal with it. All the while he protests that Adobe doesn't need to do anything to improve it to deal with the challenges of HTML 5, because only "minority" browser vendors care about that, and IE will always be king. He'd better hope so.

by seldo 17y ago

bonaldi 17y ago

There are a lot of great products in the Adobe stable -- Photoshop defined an industry, InDesign has redefined one, PDF revolutionised a lot of things (storming barricades put up by Postscript, which is also an Adobe product). The problem is that Adobe's dreadful stewardship means they all go to bloatware shit in the end. Flash may have been a great product, but it certainly isn't anymore. And its ubiquity simply shows the popularity of things people have done with it -- video being the big driver -- and doesn't prove that it is "great", any more than the number of Windows seats prove its greatness. The Flash runtime on the Mac is so poor that even their Flash PR-blogger suggests you get a flashblocker (there are also rumours that ClickToFlash was originally an inside job -- thanks for taking pity on us!) to deal with it. All the while he protests that Adobe doesn't need to do anything to improve it to deal with the challenges of HTML 5, because only "minority" browser vendors care about that, and IE will always be king. He'd better hope so.