Sometimes the forces of history make people and organizations do things that would have seemed unthinkable just months before they did them.
That seems to be what’s happening right across the street from my office, over at Adobe. What can I say? I like watching history happen outside my window… as well as birds flying by, traffic tie-ups on the Guadalupe, cranky people attacking pigeons and, of course, clouds. Lots and lots of clouds. Anyway…
It was revealed this week that Adobe is bringing a halt to Flash player development on mobile browsers, and letting go of 750 workers in order to refocus its efforts on HTML5 and their AIR platform which produces apps for several of the major app platforms. That’s not all. Adobe is abandoning Flash on connected TVs too.
So that’s interesting. Adobe is obviously trying to tackle the problem of device fragmentation on two fronts: through the support of HTML5 which is fast becoming a ubiquitous standard on all media devices, and through AIR which basically provides one development environment that produces code for several different platforms.
Of course, we prefer the HTML5 route, because in the end, AIR is yet another platform.
GigaOM reported an Adobe spokesperson said, “…we believe the right approach to deliver content on televisions is through applications, not a web browsing experience, and we will continue to encourage the device and content publishing community down that path.”
I’m not really sure how to take that quote. Sounds like they are promoting AIR more so than HTML5 in the case of connected TVs. But surely they know that all the arguments they’ve made for why HTML5 works great for mobile applications apply to the TV world as well. I think everyone agrees that a “web browsing experience” doesn’t work well on TV. That’s what makes HTML5 so great—it’s finally turned the web into a full-fledged application platform.
Perhaps I’m just getting bogged down in semantics, and the real kernel of truth behind that quote is that Adobe doesn’t want to admit that a resource-heavy client like Flash isn’t a good fit for the connected TV world. Manufacturers are trying to get the best bang for the buck out of the least amount of hardware, and the easiest integration.
So, hey Adobe, look out your window, I’m the one in the corner office waving. Sounds like you’re taking one more step towards the cloud and HTML5. Welcome to our side of the street. Who knows, maybe someday we’ll build an airborne bridge between our buildings, just like you have between yours.
