I continue to be amazed at the effort Adobe is going to to make their own platform irrelevant. They claim to want to focus on "premium copy-protected video" but do they really think that only targeting that to desktop systems when mobile adoption is skyrocketing is a good move?
Adobe seems to be pretty much clueless when it comes to Flash if you ask me. They never bothered to make a solid version of the plugin for Linux and OS X until the whole Flash-on-iOS debate started and Flash really didn't need more bad press. Then they tried get Flash on the millions of different hardware configurations on mobile, even though none of the existing Flash content was made for touch, none of the handsets had enough power to run most Flash content well, and all despite all the trouble they had supporting just the 3 major desktop OS-es. All of this effort even though Adobe doesn't make any money on Flash player at all, only on the authoring tools, which everyone could see is a dwindling market now that you can do so much on the web without any plugins.
I think their current strategy on the desktop is not so much 'content-protected video' (Flash did that 15 years ago already), but high-end gaming. They have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games. But my guess is that it's all too little, too late, and that the market for cross-platform advanced 3D graphics development is pretty small. The really big guys that would make good use of it already have their native engines ported to those OS'es that matter, and the small developers probably don't have the budget to create games that really benefit from the technology.
It's weird to see how Adobe seems to screw up so often, because they really make some very good products. The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
>The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
I think Adobe really believed they could strong-arm Apple on that. I think they were spoiled by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility at all costs[1], and thought that surely it would hurt Apple more than Adobe to let PS languish. I think they were so sure of this, in fact, that they made few arrangements for the contingency that Apple might just call their bluff. So when that happened, they had an uphill battle to fight.
it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
That wasn't entirely their fault. Apple actually did promise a 64-bit Carbon and included it in developer previews, but yanked it shortly before Leopard shipped.
> it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version
Yet, they still managed to do it before Apple got around to making iTunes use Cocoa ("oh, the irony", right?). The reality of the situtuation is that sometimes, even for flagship products, even for first-party products, sometimes portability is a critical concern, and Cocoa's reliance on Objective-C makes it very difficult to nigh-unto-impossible to not simply end up with tons of code duplication.
I am not certain what you mean by "C code runs on Cocoa": "Cocoa" describes a set of Objective-C libraries that form a framework developers can use to build applications for Mac OS X. While you can technically drop to the Objective-C runtime functions (the Objective-C equivalent of JNI) the result is often horrific.
When using Cocoa, you will find yourself constantly needing your data in the form of some random Objective-C classes. Carbon, on the other hand, stores all of its core data structures in C objects defined by a library called CoreFoundation.
This library, CoreFoundation, is something that you actually will find a copy of along with your Windows version of iTunes in the form of CoreFoundation.dll. Along with another few easily ported C libraries, this allowed iTunes to maintain the same networking and storage backends on Windows and Mac OS X.
I'd say they are more indifferent than clueless. I've read that adobe makes about 5-10% of its revenue from flash. They can build html5 tools (see edge.adobe.com) and still retain their core business, and hence profits. I wouldn't be surprised if they have been removing resources from flash for years now.
Look at what it took for them to get to embrace HTML tools, all of which are very recent. Whiney full page ads, screeching blog posts, deleted 'fuck apple' tweet tantrums. I agree that they're getting into some interesting stuff, but the path they took to get there was less than dignified. If they're indifferent now, they started out maybe not as clueless, but petulant beyond belief.
> Look at what it took for them to get to embrace HTML tools, all of which are very recent.
Recent? I don't use Adobe tools one way or another, but recent is hardly the word I'd choose. It's been, what, over a decade now, or near enough to make no matter[1]. Yes, this starts with Macromedia, but it isn't like Adobe isn't working with a group to build useful tools. Just because they support their own format doesn't mean they aren't supporting other formats.
This doesn't mean they only focused on standards compliance. They are a tools company, and they build tools for people to use.
Adobe makes money from selling the Flash authoring tool, but development of the Flash plugin is an expensive cost center. Macromedia and Adobe have spent a decade trying to monetize Flash's huge user population without much success. They can't charge users, but they had some limited success selling licenses/servers for Flash DRM video streaming. HTML5 video is unlikely to support DRM to content publishers' satisfaction any time soon.
>hey have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games.
That is true, but on the other hand it looks to me that try to scare developers away by charging them for using it (That includes that they have to open their books, who likes to do that?). I still think they are pretty clueless. Also I wonder why I should use Flash for platform independed game development, steam for Linux seems to be around the corner.
Purveyors of "premium copy-protected video" use Flash on the desktop because the process of distributing, installing and supporting PC software is a giant pain in the ass, fraught with problems and security risks, to the point that users no longer do it.
On mobile, users love apps and distributing and supporting them is far, far easier.
Further, flash runs so poorly on mobile devices, and has for so long, that anyone serious about their "premium copy-protected video" jumped-ship for a dedicate app years ago.
So it doesn't matter what Adobe does. No-one is going back to mobile Flash at this point. Providers' app investments have been made, the same source content (h.264 video) is used in both places, and they get far more out of their own dedicated app.
Further, Adobe's money is made via content creation apps. Flash was a means to that end, but they don't need it. They can still make money off production tools, particularly while people still need to maintain a content pipeline that churns out resources that work on mobile and desktop.
This is my conclusion. There was a period when they were making a lot of noise about how they were making Flash "touch friendly", releasing Air across all the platforms, etc. As time went on Flash became tolerable (and useful!) but never really "good" and I suspect the real killer was that Adobe started to see dire feedback in their sales pipeline because people were prioritising iPad and Adobe could not offer a universal solution. Then I think, as others have said, Google decided Flash support was hurting Android instead of helping it (once you have critical mass, cross platform tools become a competitive disadvantage instead of the reverse) and probably told Adobe they were on their own and that was enough for them to decide to kill it, and killing it swiftly and making money from people forced to convert was better than killing it slowly.
I do think they really tried, for a while, but it just didn't work.
Adobe has been, and probably will always be, one of the worst software development companies in existence. It is only within the last 5 years or so that they have become even remotely competent. I do believe all decent programs they have ever published (think Photoshop) have been bought from another company and rebranded under the Adobe 'seal of death'.
Prior to that Adobe's business was based on PostScript, and they developed Illustrator to take advantage of PostScript's capabilities. Then they licensed Photoshop.
