Ahead of our discussion of Apple next week, I thought this may be relevant. I was listening to NPR yesterday and they were speculating on why Apple, with all of it's web-enabled devices, would not adopt Flash for its product. According to the report, nearly 80 of the top 100 websites in the world employ Flash is some way to display their content. An iPhone user such as myself can't access them without receiving an error message.
I believe this is a strategic move on the part of Apple. They are banking on their own network effects from handheld devices to promote the creation on a new "open standard" that will undermine a competitor. Clearly it has not significantly hurt sales of Apple devices however I am concerned about the affect this will have on the iPad. More people in the tablet market will be relying on the device for large scale web browsing than they did with handhelds. I would love to hear the class' opinion on the reasons behind this move. Especially because Steve Jobs will not tell us!
There is an interesting response by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch about this issue. Got to love the first line "Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device."
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Apple is doing it for competitive reasons. Apple is probably betting that HTML5, which includes a video standard, will replace flash as the primary video distribution standard on the web.
At a recent meeting, Steve spoke about the issue. He mentioned that Flash is buggy and crashes the browser too often, believing that HTML5 offers a far better alternative.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Apple's bet on HTML5 may depend on whether or not codec standards can develop for the HTML5's video. Google and Apple are on the same side of this standards battle, which may help Apple given the popularity of Youtube.