The best way for Adobe to save Flash is by killing it
Having done several years of Flash development and having worked with many Flash developers, the recent controversy between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPad is very amusing to me. First, there are a few arguments that I want to address directly:
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's iPad launch at the end of January 2010 landed with the expected fanfare around Steve Jobs' keynote, but also with immediate friction: the device ships without Flash, cementing what both companies have confirmed is a public standoff between Apple and Adobe over the platform's exclusion. Reaction split along familiar lines — anti-DRM activists called the iPad an unprecedented extension of restrictions to general-purpose computers, while former Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt publicly endorsed the device.
Against that backdrop, this piece offers a working Flash developer's contrarian prescription — that Adobe's path to saving Flash runs through retiring it — and the argument clearly struck a nerve: Robert Scoble's Scobleizer picked it up the same day under the headline 'Google will save Flash,' extending its reach well beyond its home blog within hours of posting.
First-order effects
- Adobe's Flash runtime has no route onto the most-hyped new computing device of the year, leaving every Flash-built site, game, and video player unreachable for early iPad buyers.
- Flash developers face a split market: years of accumulated work monetizes across the desktop web but transfers nowhere near the iPad unless rebuilt against Apple's approved tools.
Second-order effects
- Media companies reportedly weighing content deals for the iPad — an unconfirmed claim, but the mechanism behind the device's promise — must now choose between Flash-based delivery and re-authoring for Apple's platform, a fork that hands pricing and distribution leverage to Apple.
- Any rival device maker courting the same audience can treat Flash compatibility as a differentiator aimed squarely at the developer base Apple just locked out.
Third-order effects
- If the exclusion stands and other platform owners follow, the deciding factor in which web technologies reach mobile audiences shifts from open standards bodies to individual app-store gatekeepers — eroding the plugin-era assumption that a single runtime reaches everyone.
- Adobe confronts a structural fork visible from inside its own developer community: defend a plugin that one dominant vendor can simply omit, or sunset the runtime and redeploy its tooling around whatever runtimes the platform owners permit.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from open web plugins to platform-owner-approved runtimes, with Apple's omission of Flash from the iPad as the forcing event.