I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything with Flash.
When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools.
Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would likely be best-of-breed and indispensable for high end web dev. All the security and performance and interoperability problems could have been solved over time. Flash is not all that different from an SVG to be honest.
One counterpoint to make: Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash never made.
Instead Adobe threw in the towel and encouraged breaking a large portion of the old internet by deprecating it.
I think moves like these amount to hundred billion dollar drags on the economy. In a sense we're all a little bit poorer as a result. It's like digging a hole and filling it back up again. It's economic activity that benefits no-one.
What Adobe destroyed is the community existing around Macromedia products. It was just unprecedented to my knowledge. Most Macromedia solutions were extremely easy to use AND improve via plugins. You could use Javascript to easily create add-ons for Flash, or Fireworks, or Dreamweaver and there was that "community" aspect that did not exist with Adobe product.
And then Macromedia got "Eloped"...
It's crazy how Adobe never leveraged that community and just pissed everybody off then it died out...
There was also that kind of "friendly" competition where teams add to come up with the most bad ass interactive experience and brands had huge budgets to promote this or that product. It was an healthy relationship between marketing and creativity. Everybody even now, remember at least some Flash websites. "2advanced" anybody? Who remembers the design of the web sites they visit today? It's all the same.
Obviously at some point, Flash ads became a nuisance, and mobile kind of killed it in the browser...
> Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers.
Unfortunately no, because TC39 rejected Ecmascript 4. Ironically, Microsoft who is responsible for Typescript is to blame for that. Because they had their own solution "Silverlight", it was short-sighted.
I was in 9th grade when I first came across 2advanced, a time in my life when I was was figuring out what my interests were. Torn between continuing to learn programming and changing course to something that seemed more “creative”, suddenly here was this thing that clearly blended both in a way I hadn’t known was possible. I consider 2a to have been a big influence on me, and to this day I remember the music, sounds, and animations from their v2 and v3 sites crystal-clear.
Adobe bungled everything about Macromedia. My livelihood was pretty much built around Macromedia during the entire 2000s and I remember how uneasy I was about the Adobe buyout back then. Macromedia conferences were seriously creative and fun and educational and developer friendly, the first year after Adobe took over they turned it into a big marketing event and within a short time span the entire community was killed off. I think back then (and maybe even now) Adobe just saw the web as a publishing platform, whereas Macromedia saw it as a playground.
Adobe claimed that Apple was stopping them from supporting Flash on the original iPhone. When Adobe did finally get Flash (barely) running on Android. It required 1GB of RAM and 1Ghz CPU. The original iPhone had a 400Mhz CPU and 128Mb of RAM.
Adobe was late shipping Flash for the Motorola Xoom. Motorola touted being able to use Flash as a feature over the iPad. Leaving it in the unfortunate situation that you couldn’t even visit the Xoom marketing page running Flash from a Xoom for the first six months.
Adobe could never get Flash working on mobile well.
EDIT: It wasn’t until the iPhone 5 introduced 5 years later in 2012 that there was an iPhone that could have met Adobe’s specs for Flash.
Yeah, it wasn’t Apple that killed Flash, it was Adobe. It died the moment Adobe bought Macromedia.
Just think, if Adobe hadn’t bungled Flash or prematurely killed off Fireworks, they could be owning the modern digital design space right now, rather than desperately trying to catch up to Figma and Sketch with XD.
And slowing down the entire design space because of closed PSD format driving out competitions and Photoshop is so slow compared to apps like Affinity Photo as its legacy code must be in the way to employ any radical improvements.
In addition to the above, iirc, there was a variant of Flash called Flash lite that ran the UI of many feature phones for quite a while. It wasn't full flash, though.
I read somewhere that Adobe could not opensource Flash Player due to some library codecs licensing issues. It was unfortunate however, that Adobe bought Macromedia. Macromedia Flash would not have caused wrath from Steve Jobs and Macromedia would have been nimble and motivated to work something out with Apple
When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools.
Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would likely be best-of-breed and indispensable for high end web dev. All the security and performance and interoperability problems could have been solved over time. Flash is not all that different from an SVG to be honest.
One counterpoint to make: Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash never made.
Instead Adobe threw in the towel and encouraged breaking a large portion of the old internet by deprecating it.
I think moves like these amount to hundred billion dollar drags on the economy. In a sense we're all a little bit poorer as a result. It's like digging a hole and filling it back up again. It's economic activity that benefits no-one.