The short answer: Yes, if it changes its strategy to one that embraces and augments the open web ecosystem, rather than continuing down the path of trying to compete with or replace it.
With the recent anti-Flash, pro-HTML5 buzz caused by the iPad and sites like YouTube offering HTML5-enabled video alternatives, I thought it would be useful to share my thoughts on the opportunities and struggles Adobe faces with the Flash platform. Given my propensity as a strong open-source advocate, it may seem odd that I bother to discuss this, but it’s an interesting thought experiment for me on where Flash still excels compared to the open web, and how it can leverage that to thrive as part of the world going forward.
Developer Tools
Flash plus Illustrator, Catalyst, Flex Builder and the rest of the Adobe CS collection provide a compelling suite of visual tools for building web sites and applications. While there are a number of attempts at building studio tools using open web technologies, they all tend to be component-driven attempts to clone PowerBuilder or Interface Builder for the web. Flash clearly leads the market in animations and the creation of interfaces that are more movie-like in their experience. For example, while it’s possible to create the famous Sports Illustrated tablet UI demo entirely with HTML5 technologies, today it is much easier to build something this visually rich with Flash. Though ironically, it won’t run on the iPad without Flash compiling to a native iPhone app.
Rendering Engine
The Flash player is really just a replacement rendering engine that works on most platforms that don’t begin with a small i. To date, it’s unfortunately been pretty crash-prone on Mac OS X and has trailed behind on Linux. But it has succeeded because it was a useful hack for improving upon the limitations of the world’s worst browsers. On Windows, it is stable and is a significant improvement to Internet Explorer’s rendering engine. Also, somewhat surprising is that in our performance tests, Flash is not actually any faster at drawing or animating objects than Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, meaning that we do not see them leveraging native hardware 2-D and 3-D acceleration APIs, which are starting to arrive in the next version of the major browsers. Which means that the edge Flash player once enjoyed with its rendering engine is no more.
Revision Cycle
Google Chrome Frame has the advantage now in being able to upgrade the host browser much like Flash can. And really, that’s been Flash’s big advantage historically: it could push updates to the world faster than browser vendors. But in the past few years, versions of Flash have actually been released slower than non-Microsoft browsers, which now include reliable auto-update mechanisms. Being able to patch, hack, and fix the web was Flash’s big advantage, and that edge is gone.
Compilation
It’s fairly interesting that Adobe has made it possible to compile Flash apps into native apps for distribution on the Apple App Store. This idea was likely inspired by PhoneGap and Appcelerator’s Titanium. But it raises an interesting question for me: could Flash compile into native HTML5-compliant applications? That would potentially decouple the benefits of the developer tools from the limitations of the player.
Embracing the Open Web
Adobe to date has dabbled in the world of open source, but Google Chrome Frame is its first real competition in the player/plug-in space, because it has two huge advantages (ignoring its disadvantages for now): it’s open-source, and it builds and extends open web protocols like HTML5, JavaScript, SVG, and more. In my opinion, Flex should have extended HTML4 or XHTML instead of being a complete rewrite from the ground up. This would allow any HTML developer to easily jump into it and then take advantage of Flash’s extension. Imagine Flex apps being unobtrusive upgrades to HTML pages, if the flash player is available! Or, imagine including a Dojo HTML fragment for a grid, using a standardized flash grid component, installed as a native component as part of the player, if that was the best rendering engine available!
Pushing the Open Web into Design Tools
As someone that can’t draw a circle in Photoshop or Illustrator, I would love for everything in a PSD or AI file to be represented by HTML/XML and CSS. Developers loathe having to wait for a designer to change text in a graphics file or modify colors in a background image. As good as the open web gets at moving more and more image functionality to native styling, there will always be concepts that cannot easily be represented tersely enough in the CSS layer. The authoring tools layer is likely the best place to make such modifications. Providing a simple tool or mechanism for developer’s to update or modify files created by designers would be useful and intriguing.
License Pricing
Given the dramatic reduction in costs of computers and software, Adobe is significantly more expensive relative to the cost of other products than it was when it started its CS pricing model. To fix this problem, Adobe has been experimenting with a subscription pricing model in Australia that allows users to pay each month to use the software. That’s more inline with expectations today as it doesn’t require a huge up-front cost. Also, Adobe could start to consider licensing affordable Flash components that are hosted on a CDN, or a number of other fine-grained payment models.
Conclusions
The open web has quickly closed the gap on Adobe’s advantages over the past two years, but there are many new opportunities for Adobe to exist and thrive in the open web ecosystem, and take advantage of the new possibilities this creates, if it can adapt to the completely new world of today’s modern web platforms.