Machine Art Mouse and PC Case, Anyone?

This article originally appeared on my CNCCookbook blog, but it was so cool I thought I’d share it here too…

Industrial Design always fascinates me. My Apple laptop is machined out of a chunk of aluminum and the work is beautiful. There is an indicator on the front that is a bar-shaped LED that peeks through the aluminum via holes that are so small the openings are invisible unless the LED is lit. My guess is they’re created by a laser as it is hard to imagine doing the volume Apple needs with twist drills. I was pleased to come across this pair of cool PC-related projects created by a partnership of Thermaltake, Level 10, and BMW Design.

What a slick design. The second entry, is more of a teaser. Here is their design for a mouse:

BMW Level 10 Mouse…

Hard to really get a sense of how this thing looks…

That’s another one to whet the Machine Art appetite!

Google Ships Bad UI For Profit. Again.

Opened my gmail this morning and went about dealing with messages, got to one asking for a meeting so I took the cursor to top of screen where the Calendar menu lives and…

Wait.  There is no calendar menu there.  Instead I am greeted by a message “welcoming me to the new way to navigate in Google.”

Oh joy.  I am so excited after having enjoyed Google’s other UI changes recently.  The one where they destroyed the contrast in gmail, making it way less usable.  Or the one where they took out the ability to share in Google Reader to anywhere except Google+.

With this “new way to navigate”, instead of just clicking on “Calendar” at the top of screen, I get to rollover the Google logo, scan down and realize Calendar isn’t even on the list, hit “More” at the bottom, and then finally get to it.  Congratulations Google, you’ve now laid claim to several more seconds of my life each time I have to access my calendar without giving me back anything of value.

Is Google really this bad at UI design?  It’s tempting to just chalk it up to that, even satisfying, but unfortunately the reality is far more insidious.

Joe Brockmeier made clear the real answer in his RWWeb article, “2011: The Year the Free Ride Died.”  In it, he writes:

The combination of Google’s housecleaning spree, relentless Facebook redesigns and privacy gaffes, and popular services being bought, being ruined or just going dark, users should be getting the hint: The free ride is over and the bill is due.

Yeah, that’s right, it isn’t just Google, it’s any company that has gotten big by giving something away and now is big enough to have tremendous inertia, no effective competition, and enough network effects to make their users just sit there and take it.  The problem, as Brockmeier points out, is that you, dear user, are not really Google’s customer.  You are inventory that they sell to their real customers, the people that advertise on these “free” services.  As a result, if they have to choose between making you happy or making their real customers happy, they’re going to choose the real customers.

Google has enough inventory in terms of users and attention, that seemingly minor changes add up to big bucks.  Changes that would annoy you and I greatly, but that don’t actually cripple the services enough to make us change (if there even was a change available), are very lucrative for Google.  Take this change to gmail.  Looks to me like they pick up that line at the top that used to be a menu to use for advertising.  And they certainly reshuffled the menus to put ad-rich revenue sources ahead of things like the Calendar.  Forget usability, we’ve got money to make here people!

I was recently pondering writing a post about how Google should make strange bedfellows consider getting together.  In particular, the world has more or less become Apple and Microsoft against Google.  Yes, there are other wild cards out there like Facebook, but Apple and Microsoft are the ones most urgently at war with Google.  Trouble is, they’re at war with each other.

As I’ve often written, the markets support both cheapest and best as two different categories.  Google is the cheapest.  It doesn’t get much cheaper than an ad model where someone else pays for your “free” product.  And certainly Apple is focused on being best with the iOS devices and Macintosh.  Microsoft, I would argue, is in a position to pursue Best with Bing versus Google.  These two companies should tie up around Bing if nothing else.  Of course they’ll worry about phones.  Microsoft is years too late, but it still thinks it has a chance to enter yet another market and struggle while losing money.  Bad idea!  Take a page from Fighter Pilot OODA strategy–be willing to drop the phone stuff permanently in exchange for a strong alliance with Apple around Bing.

Either that, or quit trying to be both cheap and best.  Give up on cheap.  Google owns that.  Figure out how to do best and don’t look back.  Google is going to keep making it easier to see best as better than cheap as they continue to ship Bad UI for Profit.

The enemy of your enemy is your friend.

Why Microsoft Needs a Fighter Pilot Instead of a Moist N’ Easy Snack Cake Salesman

Wondering where that crazy title and the photo came from?

First, check out Steve Ballmer’s early pre-Microsoft career.  He was the Product Manager for Proctor & Gamble’s Moist N’ Easy Snack Cakes.  No harm in that, in fact he apparently sat near Jeffrey Immelt, who would eventually rise to become one of GE’s celebrated CEO’s.  Okay, what about the fighter pilot thing?  That would be a reference to fighter pilot John Boyd (he looks sorta like Jimmy Wales dad if the right photo comes up on the Wikipedia ad), whose “OODA” strategy is what Microsoft is missing most these days.  I’ve written about Boyd a few times before, and this is perhaps my best article to date about Boyd and his “OODA” strategy.

My thoughts are motivated by a recent post from Microsoft GM of Windows Phones Charlie Kindel.   Kindel can’t understand why the Windows Phone hasn’t been more successful, because he feels it is superior to the alternatives, and particularly to Google’s Android.   He argues in his post that the Windows Phone isn’t more successful simply because Google has less friction in its dealings with the Carriers.  He says that App Developers are mostly irrelevant.  That statement alone leaves me in little doubt about how App Developers should feel about the platform, and it isn’t good.  That’s not all, he further goes on to say that End Users just do what they’re told by advertising and retail sales professionals.  Oh my, Charlie, are you sure you want to be on the record for that too?

Despite all that, he never really does say why the Windows Phone is a superior product, he just asserts that it’s true.  With GM’s like this, its no wonder Microsoft has a problem with their phone.  But the problem actually starts pretty far from one GM and his views, however misguided some like me may think they are.  MG Siegler’s Paris Lemon blog has it right in three words, “Way Too Late”, and this is the problem Microsoft has in general.  Scoble adds further clarity by pointing out that when people buy things, they want to make sure that what they’re buying doesn’t make them look stupid.  In this context, what that means is if they’re going to choose to deviate from the well traveled paths–buy an Android if you want Open/Cheaper or buy an iPhone if you want Best Product–there had better be a really obvious reason to choose to be different.  One they can point out to their friends and get some kudos back for.  It has to be a defensible decision.  Because people hate when their buying decisions make them look like idiots, especially for an obvious visible status symbol and piece of Tech Jewelry like a cellphone.

Markets move by punctuated equilibrium (call it a paradigm change if you prefer, but I like the evolution metaphor) followed by periods of slower innovation and consolidation.  The punctuated equilibrium happens when some massive innovation hits that makes the new product look like a whole new category, and not just an incremental improvement over some other.  Apple and Steve Jobs have made a huge business and a career out of punctuating our equilibriums.  Not long after punctuated equilibrium, the commoditizers show up.  Their job is to give you 80% of what the innovator did at a much lower price.  Let’s not confuse the commoditizers with fast followers.  The latter are more about perfecting an idea that got launched a little before the innovation was done and understood.  Facebook did an awesome job fast following MySpace.

What does all this have to do with OODA?

Let’s start by defining Boyd’s OODA strategy.   The acronym “OODA” stands for Observe Orient Decide and Act.  I’ve written about OODA in the past and enjoyed Boyd’s writings on the subject, which are excellent strategy musings.  Given that it is a strategy evolved for fighter pilot dogfighting, it should come as no surprise that it is primarily a competitive strategy.  The steps are as follows:

-  Observe what the competition is doing.

-  Orient that observation to the market: what does it mean?

-  Decide how you want to react to it.

-  Act on that Decision.

An “OODA Loop” is a complete cycle of gathering the information, deciding what it means, and acting on it.  It is your decision making cycle for change.  Companies alternate between that decision making and the execution needed to deliver the result.  Now here is the important trick:  if your company’s OODA decision loop time is faster than the competitor’s, you will force your competitor to constantly react to your moves and they will fall further and further behind.  Ideally you obsolete their work after they’ve spent as much as possible of the cost and not yet gotten much benefit for it.

Once upon a time, long ago, Microsoft was in a decent position, OODA-wise.  They would see something some competitor was doing, and copy that innovation quickly enough, and with the force of plenty of capital and moementum from their various monopoly businesses, that they had already absorbed the competitive advantage and taken it for their own before the competitor could complete another OODA-loop and develop a new competitive advantage.  For example, they sucked the juice right out of Apple’s Macintosh GUI quantum leap with Windows, and did it fast enough to blunt the Mac’s advance for years.

But, somewhere along the way, things changed and Microsoft didn’t.  The Tech World’s notion of a good OODA Loop got a lot shorter.   Agile techniques were introduced.  Lighter weight and more potent tools replaced the old monolithic C++ style tools.  Apps moved first onto the web and then into the Cloud.  Pretty soon we reached a world where major OODA innovation cycles started taking 1 year, then 6 months, then quarterly, and now monthly in some cases.  Meanwhile, Microsoft never retooled.  Their OODA innovation cycles never seem to get it done in a year, let alone a month.  It takes them a good 3 years to show up to battle, at which point the dog fighters have moved a long ways from the point where Microsoft had aimed.  The puck had come and gone, and they never were skating to where it would be.

This is not the end of the world if a company is an amazing innovator.  Apple doesn’t create the next amazing iOS device in a month either.  But when your business model is to copy and commoditize the innovations of others, it’s tough to be 3 years late to the party, especially for hardware.  With that much lead time you’re no longer delivering a fresh idea at a great price and the incumbent also has the advantage for hardware of having built up a potent supply chain so their own cost basis is lower.

Fundamentally, Microsoft has to learn how to be far more Agile because it lives in an Agile world.  There have been glimmerings back in the Gates days, for example galvanizing the company during the browser wars, but it has been a long time since the Redmondians have been able to turn the ship so swiftly.  If those days are truly behind it, it’s going to be a struggle just to hold onto what they already have in hand, let alone grow.  They must either get much more Agile or much better at Kinect-style innovation (i.e. equivalent innovation much more frequently).

We can look at these different styles versus decision loop speed something like this:

Google and Microsoft are largely commoditizers.  They bring other people’s innovations to the market more cheaply, sometimes by copying, sometimes by acquisition.  They probably don’t like to look at it that way, but it is largely what they’re doing.  The exception is Google’s search business, which they can argue they innovate in, and of course there will be exceptions for MSFT too.  But the important insight is that Google seems to be more Agile, perhaps because of their web upbringing.  They can turn that crank faster and get inside the OODA loop of others.  The Innovators are dropping the dinosaur killers into the pond.  If they are secretive and hide their innovation until it is ready, as Apple does, and if the innovation is truly a revolutionary dinosaur killer and not just a little bit of evolution, they can afford to be pretty slow delivering these innovations.

But, both Commoditizers and Innovators are subject to the OODA loop.  If the market’s reaction to what the players are doing, and the market is driven by the player’s actions, is faster than your OODA decision cycle, you lose.  Right now, Microsoft is flanked by Apple and Google whichever way it tries to go.

The Golden Era of Tech Blogging is Over? Hogwash!

If you wait long enough, some topic will come along to reignite your muse and you’ll find you just have to write a blog post.   It’s been a little while since I wrote about my Kindle Fire ups and downs.  I’m still very happy with the little Fire, and was recently surprised to discover that overall, video quality on the Fire seems better than it is on my iPad with Netflix.  This seems to be an artifact of how much compression gets used by Netflix, since I can see the video I’m watching go in and out of fine detail focus.  But that is not why we are here!

Jeremiah Owyang has written a blog post, promptly Techmemed, that says the Golden Era of Tech Blogging has ended.  It’s fundamental underpinnings seem to revolve as much around whether anyone can make money at is as whether the practice of Tech Blogging is done.  He supports his thesis with these 4 arguments:

1.  Corporate Acquisitions Stymie Innovation.  The argument is that a big corps acquire feisty Tech Blogs, they squeeze the life out of them, killing innovation.  Dude, have you been through a “liquidity event”?  They all squeeze the life out of the acquiree.  I can’t remember a single acquisition I have gone through where the tech survives today, although most of them the tech would be useful today.  Most of the time acquisitions fail to generate net positive shareholder value.  Rarely is the talent kept aboard, and rarer still does the talent continue to appear as, um, talented.  Does that mean any acquisition is a sure sign the game is up in whatever space?  Nope.  It means the talent gets to go do it again, quite possibly in an adjacent space since they know how the rules work there.  Are all these bloggers jumping out of these tech blog acquisitions abandoning blogging to join enterprise software or some such?  Nope.

2.  Tech blogs are experiencing major talent turnover.  This is a minor rehash of #1, so not clear why it stands on its own.  As the lawyers say, “asked and answered.”

3.  The audience needs have changed, they want: faster, smaller, and social.  No kidding?  And we know this, how?  People deal with the competition for their attention in a lot of ways.  Some decide the best idea is to switch to media where an “information quantum” is a lot smaller, Twitter being the extreme.  Some, perhaps best personified by great bloggers like Seth Godin, deal with it by upping the quality of the feeds they will spend time on.  What’s really clear is that a lot of the Social side are trying to design their products to lock up attention space just the way the old retailers liked to lock up shelf space.  But my attention is not a shelf, and I am not getting enough of value to participate in that game.  Hence, while we know that Google+, for example is growing, we have no idea what the real engagement there is doing.  In cases where we can see engagement, like Twitter, it ain’t great.  I wonder whether Owyang will recommend to his corporate clientelle that they drop blogging and focus on all this social.  It would be interesting if he did, but I think it would be a mistake both for Owyang and the Corporations to follow that advice.

Looking at the issue of how to deal with all the noise, I want to reiterate there are two types of folks.  Some thrive on the choas.  The more they can get, the better.  Scoble is one such, and I am not surprised at his quote that “…when I write something on Twitter,Facebook, Quora, or Google+ I get immediate feedback. I get thousands of views very quickly and get distribution through things like Google’s Currents or Flipboard readers. Blogging seems to have struggled in some of these areas.”  Scoble is just chasing eyeballs and traffic.  But is that what you’re chasing.

I met with Owyang to pitch him on a company once.  He’s definitely from the Scoble ADD crowd.  He barely had time to hear what we were talking about or to ask questions he was so busy with Twitter during the meeting.

4.  As space matures, business models solidify – giving room for new disrupters.  That’s a really odd way of relating what the body of the text goes on to say, which is that there are now enough bloggers in the world producing good enough content that the quick first mover flash in the pan can no longer scoop up vast amounts of traffic with little effort and then cash out.  So what?  The flash in the pan stuff shows up in every segment and unless you want to make your living chasing flashes in the pan instead of delivering real value, it isn’t cause for concern.  Flash chasers are fundamentally looking for the next latent Ponzi scheme.  When it gets harder to find one the focus sharpens on quality and everyone wins.  That’s a far cry from deciding the era is over.

Sarah Lacy has a few choice words on Owyang’s post as well, and disagrees equally as much with his conclusion.

Pundits and consultants are paid to tell us something we didn’t know, and the successful ones will manage to do that.  Just because it’s different doesn’t make it right or wrong.  Decide for yourself.

Kindle Fire: WiFi Problems Fixed, Cool Device!

I wanted to follow up on my unhappy post about Kindle Fire.  When I first got the device, I couldn’t do anything with it because I couldn’t connect to WiFi.

As a quick aside, having had side-by-side 3G and WiFi on my iPad, I really like having the 3G and frequently turn WiFi off.  I have found it is a real hassle connecting to Hot Spots compared to the ease of 3G.

The good news is I was able to get my Kindle Fire to connect.  I did a ton of research on the web, tried to get help from Amazon Tech Support, but basically got nowhere.  Despite hearing many accounts of people with a similar problem, there were also tons of people out there having no problem at all.  Ever the optimist (Engineers always are), I gambled that maybe the problem wasn’t so much my Kindle but perhaps it was my router.  Now granted, every other wireless device in Da House connected to that router just fine, but it was really old, and it was really easy to bop over to Staples and pick up a new router.  For the record, the router I dumped was a Belkin N1.  I planned to buy another just like it, but discovered once I got to Staples that it seemed like the router world had undergone a makeover.  Okay, so I bought a sleek Cisco router for $79.  I plugged it in, and voila, the Kindle Fire immediately started working.  I will probably try to configure that Belkin to be another access point as I can’t quite get WiFi everywhere in the house, so I will get some value beyond just getting the Kindle Fire to work.

Folks who have older routers may want to consider replacing them.

Many are saying the OS update to 6.1 fixed their problem, but they had to side load that with a cable.  I didn’t try that because I didn’t have a mini connector USB cable on hand.  The first thing my Kindle Fire did was to download that update and it all went very fast.

Well, so how good is the Kindle Fire?  Here are my thoughts:

First thing is, I would not want to trade it for my iPad, which is what a lot of people are saying.  I would say that the difference between a laptop for casual things and an iPad is about the same as the difference between an iPad and a Kindle Fire.  In other words, iPad is a more powerful, flexible device.  But, for what it does, Kindle Fire is really cool.  I also like the UX on the Kindle Fire.  It makes it an extremely intuitive appliance for content consumption.  It is even further from the laptop in terms of being a general-purpose computing device (I don’t hold with all these silly linkbaiters claiming PC’s are dead), but that’s fine if you want a great content consumption appliance.

Some are saying the Kindle Fire has lousy or no Industrial Design, but I disagree.  The physical hardware is about as cool as it can be while keeping the price down.  I do wish they had splurged on the hardware switches the iPad has to lock the display orientation or to change volume, but really it isn’t that big a deal.  The software UX, where it doesn’t especially cost more to do a good job looks great.  There are a lot of little touches that make it nice.  As Ars Technica says, “Love, love, love the lock screen photos.”  Good review over there, BTW.

I’ve been using the two interchangeably for web browsing, Kindle book reading, and Movie/TV watching.  Having Amazon’s content available as a first class part of the Kindle Fire UX, and particularly having all the free stuff that comes with Amazon Prime is just bloody awesome.  It feels like a great value and it is great fun to use.  It’s biggest advantage over iPad is all the free video movies and TV episodes.  Streaming that stuff is easy and it rocks.  I’ve been watching old episodes of Star Trek, the X-Files, and 24, you know, the usual Geek stuff.  The little 7″ screen is 1024×768, and when it is sitting on your chest 6″ in front of your nose it looks awesome.  I started noticing some detail in some of these episodes I’m familiar with that I’d never noticed.  Sweet!

In terms of reading things, the display is crisp and readable, but I much prefer the iPad.  It’s bigger, the fonts are a little bigger, and it just seems a better vehicle for me to consume email, read blogs, or read a Kindle Book.  Given a choice between no tablet or a Kindle Fire, the Kindle Fire is an awesome experience for reading, its just not an iPad.

The Kindle Fire form factor is interesting.  It’s about the biggest thing I could comfortably hold in my hand.  I could see a lot of things being very convenient that way.

Last point, my wife has staked a claim on the Kindle Fire and made it clear that I need to get done “reviewing it” and pass it along to her.  She’s got a 2nd gen Kindle Reader she loves, and she sees this as her upgrade.  I think she’s right, BTW.  She also loves the video (and watches a lot more TV than me, so ought to have it), and she has already confirmed and likes the fact that it fits conveniently in her purse, which was never a possibility for the iPad.

All I can say is that when the Kindle Fire leaves me shortly, I am really going to be wishing my iPad had better video support!

Wait Before Buying a Kindle Fire: WiFi Problems

Got my Kindle Fire yesterday, eagerly anticipating a morning of shiny new object joy followed by a nice Thanksgiving dinner.  No joy.  My Kindle Fire will not connect to WiFi and it can’t do much of anything without it.

This is rapidly becoming a known problem.  The Amazon support boards are filled with people reporting the issue and Techcrunch also ran an article.

Lots of placebos are being discussed on the support boards and I tried all of them with no success.  They range from the usual Customer Service we-don’t-know-what’s-really-going-on-but-we-need-to-get-you-off-the-phone answers like reboot, retype your password, yada, yada, to voodoo around whether it supports all the different WiFi protocols (some say “B” is the culprit and if you set the router to G or N you’re fine) and so on and so forth.  There is an update, 6.1, that some claims fixes it.  I have to go scare up the right serial cable to try that, but many report it didn’t help so I haven’t been in a big hurry.

One comment on the Tech Support board tells the story:

“Amazon, you know you have a problem, and you know you’re not going to announce it until after Black Friday’s sales have ended, but you had sure better have an easy fix for it or you’ll be facing millions of returns.”

I attempted to get Tech Support via email, but their response was simply a note that said sorry, can’t help unless you call in.  Not what you’d expect to hear from the would-be premier Cloud company Amazon!

I would’ve expected that with as many as are reporting the trouble, they would have a coordinated response to keep the situation under control and hopefully get it fixed.

BTW, if you choose to ignore the initial setup and just dive in, the overall UI is pretty confusing.  It keeps asking to connect on most anything you do, you click the connect, and nothing happens.  There’s no feedback about whether it connected or not, but in my case it did not.

The device looks like a nice form factor, and I wanted some kind of Android device in the house amid our sea of iOS devices.  So far, not impressed.  I will eventually make that support call, probably tomorrow so as not to spoil Thanksgiving Day, but unless it is actually helpful, I’ll be returning the Kindle.

How Do You Market Cheap Socially?

Sameer Patel has an interesting post that got me to thinking:  How do you market cheap socially?

What got Sameer to post was the following (in his words):

Social Times reports that the way to get more “Likes” on Facebook is to offer coupons to satiate the what’s-in-it-for-me hunger of an increasingly discriminating social networker.

This might well be that moment in social media marketing history when we look back and say – “what were we thinking??”

Here’s my problem with that–what do you do if what you sell and market is “cheap?”

Michael Porter’s musings on competitive strategy suggests there are 3 winning market strategies:

1.  You can build the best.

2.  You can be the low-cost provider.

3.  You can focus on some under served niche that the other two are ignoring.

There are a lot of companies in this world who adopt #2–what they’re selling is “cheap”.  Come buy from us, because we’ll give you the best price.  The whole notion of brand tends to facilitate cheap, except where the brands go out of their way to attack cheap sellers, the way Rolex or Louis Vuitton would.  Once you become fixated on a brand that satisfies #1 (i.e. you view it as the best), all that’s left is to find the cheapest source of #1.  The businesses that act as middlemen, retailers that sell the brands, often fall back on #2 to market themselves.  Yes, you can buy that Canon DSLR a lot of places, but ours is cheaper.

If you think about it, the Internet is ideally suited to convey the messaging of #2 because #2 is a search game.  Amazon facilitates that search for cheap, eBay facilitates it, Craigslist is there, and certainly any search engine spends a great deal of time processing searches that boil down to trying to find the best price on something.  I do it myself all the time and so do you.

Enter Social networks like Facebook.  We’re told that it is important for us to “engage” with our customers and to “join the conversation” with them.  Yet, what engagement or conversation is needed in the quest for cheap?  Not much really.  In fact, it somewhat detracts from the experience because we’re suspicious that if we stop to listen for too long, we might accidentally absorb the sales pitch and pay too much for some article we’ve vowed to get the best possible price on.

So what’s a poor purveyor of parsimony (sorry, couldn’t resist) to do in order to leverage Facebook and the legion of other Social channels?

Why it seems pretty obvious.  If you’re selling cheap, you’ve got to sell it everywhere.  Why not offer coupons for “Likes” if you are running that sort of company?  You’re actually not marketing your marketing as Sameer says.  Rather, you’re offering one of the many tricks of your trade, in this case a coupon, to convince your would-be followers that you are indeed the bona fide cheapest source of the product they seek.  And even if it isn’t the product they seek, it is still a good deal, and a consumer looking for cheap is probably interested in more cheap they didn’t even know they needed.  I think we still have a 55 gallon drum of crunchy peanut butter around here somewhere from the days before we banned ourselves from Costco unless we were stocking up supplies for a party.  Last on the list of reasons to do it is that as Likes, +1′s, and other Social Signals increasingly impact SEO, it will become harder and harder to sell “cheap” unless you engage in these activities.  After all, one of the ways you got to be so cheap is you quit paying to have charming personalities engage with customers.  They’re over at Nordstrom and have been absent from Walmart for a long time if they were ever there.  You ain’t got nuttin’ but a whole lot of cheap to talk about, so hand out those coupons freely and hope your SEO will still be able to get you noticed.

All this musing on “cheap” does make one wonder whether the Internet helps or hurts any of Porter’s 3 big competitive strategies.  It looks to me like #3 benefits the most because I see it as the Long Tail.  Finally we can target ever smaller niches and aggregate enough of them to yield an interesting business.  Cheap rolls along happy as a clam.  No sales tax online (yet!).  Plenty of new tools to get the word out that you’re cheap.  How can you go wrong with that, other than that lower market friction means lower margins and cheap’s were already razor thin.  That’s probably why the latest iteration of give-away-something-of-apparent-value-to-lock-them-in is doing so well in the form of products like the iOS Walled Gardens and the new Kindle Fire.

Perhaps the one that is most challenged is #1.  In the old days, when you want the best, it seems like it was easier to seek it out and touch it.  There were fewer degrees of “best”, less diversity.  Perhaps I am confusing what to me looks like a candidate for “Best” but is in reality merely a niche product and I didn’t realize I live in that niche.  Either way, it seems like search brings an embarrassment of riches when it comes to best.  Yet, it is the products that truly are “Best” that I think have the biggest opportunity to do those Social Things that we dream about and that Sameer wishes companies would do instead of offering Coupons.  It is the products that are “Best” that have the greatest opportunity to produce wonderful content for Inbound marketing that gets good SEO.  The “Best” crowd actually have something worth talking about, worth engaging with, and worth a conversation.  This is true too for the niche players.

On balance, the arms race between the three models continues.  They each have good strategies to employ, even if they don’t appeal to everyone.  That’s normal.  That’s why we have 3 flavors.

How Should We Think of Flash Going Forward?

Before writing this second part of my two-part series on Flash (first part: Flash: Misunderstood by Adobe, Apple, the Haters, and the Press), I wanted to allow sufficient time for all the shoes to drop.  Adobe needed to get their word out and the blogosphere needed to get its word out as well.  Now it’s time to go back and analyze what the future of Flash, Flex, and AIR look like going forward.

HTML5 is Inevitable

With apologies to Agent Smith, if there was ever the slightest doubt, and there should not have been, the noisy sound of Flash disappearing from mobile platforms is the sound of HTML5′s inevitability.  It’s the standard, and it was always going to be inevitable.  HTML5 is also inevitable just because it’s easier not to think of doing a project for more than one platform.   Companies prefer fewer platforms, all other things considered.

But, not only is it inevitable, the demise of Flash for mobile browsers should accelerate HTML5′s evolution and inevitability.  After all, the world used to be able to use Flash as a crutch whenever HTML couldn’t hack it.  That crutch has now been kicked out from underneath us, courtesy of Apple and Adobe deciding not to allow Flash on mobile browsers.  That will put market forces behind getting HTML5 up to the capabilities needed sooner rather than later.

Fragmentation is Inevitable

One thing Flash made it possible to do was to ignore fragmentation to a degree.  Write once, run everywhere was a beautiful thing.  It always is.  That promise is what put Java firmly ahead of C++ for a long time, and it is also a large part of what fueled Flash, together with the minimal capabilities that HTML and Javascript had for a long time.

Now companies are going to face fragmentation.  That means browsers will have differing levels of compatibility with HTML5, either due to features being missing, or to differences in how the features are implemented.  This is a problem that just never came up with Flash.  You wrote the code and it ran.  It’s been a huge problem for HTML/AJAX applications, and it will continue to be as bad or worse for HTML5.

If you run a software company, it means you’ll have to invest resources dealing with these browser incompatibilities.  This is some of the worst kind of pain for developers, because often the incompatibilities are not clearly documented.  You just have to keep trying different variations of code until you find code that works on all browsers, or you have to maintain different versions by browser.  You’re shooting in the dark.  It is an opportunity for those HTML5 tool makers that make the investment to ease the pain, but that’s a big investment and it remains to be seen who will really step up with a broad enough and well-proven solution.

In the worst case, your software development costs may go up substantially depending on how bad the fragmentation is.  This is not unlike the problem of supporting many databases, or many application servers, for Old School Enterprise Software.  At one company where I ran R&D, we invested as much as 40% of our R&D cycles basically on portability across many DB and app server platforms.  It shouldn’t be that bad here, but I could easily see it costing 20-25% more.  Or, companies will simply decide to quit supporting some platforms.  We’ve all been to sites that forced us to upgrade or switch browsers before we could use the site.  Unfortunately, for mobile platforms that only support one browser, that’s going to be tough.

It will be years before HTML5 catches up to where Flash is today

Flash has always been about a lot more than video and annoying animations on web sites, but the press and the haters never seem quite able to make that conceptual leap.  It’s a pity, but even if we limit ourselves to comparing Flash to HTML5 on movies and such, HTML5 has a long ways to go.  Consider for example ArsTechnica’s article, “The Trials and Tribulations of HTML5 Video in the Post-Flash Era.”  This is an unabashedly pro-HTML5 article that points out just how far HTML5 has to go on video alone.  Read the article, but the highlights for me is that the Open Standard lovers at Mozilla still have to use Flash to do real time streaming of their Red Panda cub mascots and the discussion of how the lack of DRM standards and availability for HTML5 means the content owners and streamers still can’t endorse it.  BTW, the latter are only too happy to drag their feet until they perceive some perfect solution.  They don’t want it to be easy to get access to their content.

If we’re lucky, we may get these video issues resolved by this time next year.  Finally, we’ll have video, but that’s a tiny part of what you can do with Flash today, and most Flash proponents would argue it is an unimportant part.  What about the rest of what you could do with the Flash ensemble?  What about Apps?

Flash/Flex/AIR Going Forward:  King of Apps Platforms?

Putting aside video, why would anyone have cared about Flash/Flex/AIR to start with?  If things were as bad as the haters said, it just wouldn’t matter.  Let’s go back a very short while in time, to before the iOS/Jobs kerfluffle started the process of killing Flash.  To a time when it was largely about the desktop.  We had largely the same Flash/Flex/AIR that we have today.  In fact, one could argue Adobe’s failure to evolve them fast enough led to their demise on mobile because they just didn’t present well–too many performance problems, too much battery consumption.

Before Flash had these mobile issues, it was a pretty neat platform.  It could build the richest UX anyone had ever seen.  The world had been pursuing interface builders for a long time.  I saw my first one on Steve Jobs’ NeXT, and most of the reason we bought one for Borland’s labs was to study the developer tools on NeXT.  Visual Basic got to be what it was largely because of its nifty interface builder.  That was the Visual in Visual Basic.  Adobe brought together an interface builder, a very nice OOP framework of objects called Flex, and a great language called Actionscript under one roof, and they made it run everywhere.  Even better, it was completely portable, write once, run anywhere.  With AIR, we could build powerful desktop applications.

Let’s be really clear about the advantages versus the alternatives:

- Write once run anywhere.  Still true for apps, no longer even in the running for browsers.

- Better language.  Actionscript is a much more modern than Javascript.  It has even run a lot faster for most of its life than Javascript.  Ironically, it was more the runtime functions, such as how video was implemented without supporting the native GPU, that hampered Flash performance.  If there is one thing developers seem to get wrapped around the axle about, it is their religion around their languages.  A lot of Actionscript developers really have to hold their noses when they try to switch to javascript.  Ironically (lots of irony for Flash), it is an Ecmascript language like javascript and one could directly graft its features into javascript if only you could get all the standards-making players to agree to do so.  One wonders whether HTML5 (or 6?) will ever tackle the problem of improving javascript.

- Rich Ecosystem.  There is a ton of code and expertise out there waiting to be leveraged for your Flash project.

- Standard Framework:  Love the Flex framework or hate it, at least it was standard and there was a considerable investment in it.  And if you didn’t like it, there were lots of other frameworks.

For some reason, most of the developer stack sex appeal has been on the back end server side.  MySQL and NoSQL.  Cloud Technologies.  Ruby on Rails, node.js, or name your favorite language du jour.  The client has always been sorely neglected.  Perhaps this is a function of the Internet revolution, where the focus has been on HTML, and innovative front end languages like Smalltalk fell by the wayside.  HTML itself is hacks layered on hacks.  It started out not much better off than half duplex 3270 green screens.  After years and years we finally added the AJAX hacks to make things a little nicer.  But it was never really designed to be elegant.  The original prototype for javascript was built in 10 days and rushed out the door.  That’s not to say the prototype didn’t have good breeding, Brendan Eich, it’s creator, has gone into all that, but nevertheless, it’s not a language that’s particularly polished.

Where are the cool client side stacks that are open and portable across many platforms?

There are some stacks built for writing games.  I’ve looked at a bunch of them hoping one will be a good Flash successor.  Sure doesn’t look like it.  They’re just so game-centric, and they have other issues that mitigate against calling them the ultimate app technologies.

What about HTML5 itself?  Well it just isn’t set up to live outside the browser.  I suppose it could someday.  After all, if node.js can bring javascript to the server, it seems very likely we can build some kind of equivalent to AIR for javascript.  In fact, AIR itself can be used with other languages and one would think making it work with HTML5 will be a high priority for Adobe.  For a time, Google supported this thing called Gears that was aimed at being able to run web apps while disconnected from the net.  But the future of gears is somewhat in doubt.  Whatever may come of turning HTML5 into an app platform has to wait until it has caught up on the web with things like video.

As far as I can tell, if you want a killer rich UX environment for creating powerful apps that are write once run anywhere on the desktop or mobile, Flash/Flex/AIR is the only game in town.  It’s no wonder, then, that this is where Adobe has chosen to make their final stand with Flash, targeting precisely that audience.  It’s unfortunate that they have so poorly understood the trust issues that their other announcements would create.  It may be that even though they have this fabulous platform, there’s been so much damage to the trust of their developers that they will not be able to successfully leverage it.

Going forward, developers will have to decide whether they believe Adobe is sufficiently committed that they want to use this platform for apps, or whether they’d rather take a politically safer route and deal with an inferior platform.  The costs are not insignificant in going the politically correct route, and worse, you don’t even really have the HTML5 wind at your back for non-browser apps.  Flash will be here for years, and even if Adobe does not continue to improve it, you already have the best tools for creating rich UX apps on all platforms, so maybe its worth ignoring the political considerations for a while longer in order to give alternatives a few years to catch up.

What it means for Adobe and Google going forward

As far as Adobe is concerned, they’ve got to be licking their wounds.  The strategy they’ve launched was poorly conceived and poorly communicated.  To the world it looked like Big Corporate Cutting Costs again, while they ignored the impact on the community.   Whether that’s what happened or not is immaterial, there is a large audience that feels betrayed.  Those who stick with it through inertia will be loath to be quite so loyal again, and in particular, their management will be much harder to convince going forward.  Everyone will be trying all the alternatives.

With that said, the Flash/Flex/AIR platform for apps is the best toolkit there is for building rich apps and it will take years to usurp that in any meaningful way.  Companies will have to choose between supporting fewer platforms (i.e. just iOS), living with fragmentation and loss of productivity if they walk from Flash, or living with the current political climate around Flash.  Not a happy choice to be sure.

What can Adobe do to shore up the trust issue?

I’d recommend two things.  First, in for a penny in for a pound.  Open Source the remaining bits of the platform–the Flash Player and AIR.  You’re in the business of selling tools, so keep Flash Builder to yourselves if need be, but you may as well put the rest of it out there so the community can at least be the masters of their own destiny.  You’ve already done it with Flex, and there are other bits and pieces.  Get it over with now.  Who knows, maybe this will re-ignite support for Flash in mobile browsers.  Second, declare your commitment in dollars and cents.  The secret fear everyone has is that the Adobe resources being committed to Flash dwindle day by day and announcement by announcement.  Put a stake in the ground around that.  If you have reduced the heads focused on Flash, tell us by how much.  Commit to keeping levels where they are, or at least be transparent about what’s really going on with your investment in Flash.

For Google, this has been as big a mess for you as for Adobe.  Guys, I don’t know how you can afford to let even one reason to pick an Android device over an iOS device go away.  There are definitely people picking Android over iOS because it (used to) support Flash.  Check out the comments on this thread.  The latest data sure shows lackluster interest in Android Tablets.  Apparently you have to slash prices all the way to Kindle Fire levels and put a huge name like Amazon’s on the device to get traction.  There’s also questions about how well apps sell even among the audience that bought Android.  Despite your 50% market share, Piper Jaffray says you only have 7% app revenue share.  That’s not good.  You should get with Adobe and embrace this whole Open Source movement for Flash.  Convince them to Open Source the rest of it and announce your own major commitment to keep it going.  Continue to build it into Chrome and keep it alive on your mobile platform.  Push as only Google can and Adobe clearly can’t.  You need to differentiate versus iOS.

For everybody else, analyze the impact of fragmentation

For everybody else, analyze the impact of fragmentation because that’s the big strategic move that’s afoot.

For smaller players, fragmentation is toxic.  If I am already being spread thin having to support more platforms, I will be looking for sensible cut off points where there is too little market share to matter.  I will draw my line in the sand there, and you will be stuck on the other side with not enough oxygen.  This is not an issue for iOS.  It is so successful, it goes at the top of the ports list.  Google Android, also safe, but needs to worry about the troubling preference of buyers for iOS as well as the patent wars.  Smaller share browser and mobile platform owners, look out.  You’re the ones who will be hardest hit by fragmentation.  Fragmentation benefits the incumbents and slows down the adoption of innovators.  It’s sand in the machine because it soaks up cycles that would otherwise be available for innovation.

Fragmentation is an interesting issue for Microsoft.  They’ve contributed to Flash’s demise by announcing they’re dropping plug-ins from Windows 8.  The question for Microsoft is going to be how much longer they can retain enough market share through their desktop hegemony to force people to deal with their platforms.  I have been watching incompatibility with current versions of IE get worse almost daily, particularly on G0ogle web properties, but fairly widespread.  IE hasn’t really changed, so it is the sites that are choosing to make changes without being concerned with IE compatibility.  Microsoft may already lack sufficient mindshare to convince developers to follow their lead if Win 8 and versions of IE related to Win 8 require much porting effort.

When Capital Isn’t Scarce

For a long time VC’s and other investors bemoaned SaaS.  I head more than one say that nobody would ever be able to raise as much money as Salesforce did to IPO–$70M–so you just had to figure out how to do it much more cheaply than Salesforce had.

This morning I read that Marketo has raised a whopping $50M round, bringing their total to $107M.  Zuora is not far behind, raising $36M for a total of $80M.

I guess the conventional wisdom was wrong, and it hasn’t been that long ago that I was hearing that companies would have to be able to get there for a lot less than $70M.

This trend is interesting.  Marketo and Zuora are great companies, but they’re niche players compared to Salesforce, and SFDC was much earlier to the SaaS party.  They also have a lot more competition than it seems like SFDC did at the time.

I’m not sure what the justification is for these valuations and sums raised.  I do know there is a dearth of significant new SaaS companies in the pipeline.  You can build consumer Internet companies all day long on the Ramen budget Sand Hill has decreed is what works, but not Enterprise Software companies.  I don’t think Salesforce, Marketo, or Zuora could’ve been created out of a Y Combinator-like scenario.  In other words, if today’s rules had been in effect, they never would’ve been founded.  Interesting to wonder what companies are not being founded today because of those rules.  I did notice that there is a small but growing backlash against the whole capital-efficient-minimum-viable-product thesis.  Even Scoble had a rant on about it and he likes every shiny new thing.  Even shiny has a much higher minimum viable bar these days.

The VC market, like any other investment market, is a strange combination of herd behavior and contrarianism.  Being a contrarian is risky.  You have to pick the right time and the right investment thesis to do it.  Much safer to follow the herd right up until valuations are so high and competition so fierce that nobody is making money.  That’s when you need to start placing some contrarian bets.

I’ll be interested to see if the VC world gets back to funding more early stage Enterprise Software that may need significant capital even to build a product.  This may also simply be a judgement call to bet on the latest possible companies that will be ready to IPO soonest.  The former is a contrarian play, the latter a herd play.  Like I said, you need both, and you need to time the application of each appropriately.

Flash: Misunderstood by Adobe, Apple, the Haters, and the Press

Seldom have I seen a technology so widely adopted yet so poorly understood, so polarized between haters and fanboys, and so indifferently managed by its owners.  It may have many other problems, but Flash’s worst problem is how widely it is misunderstood by key parties.

Flash is Misunderstood by Adobe

Adobe misunderstands not just Flash, but perhaps PR in general.  Steve Jobs could not have done more harm to the platform if he had choreographed the recent announcement that Flash would be abandoning Mobile Browsers.  How they could have let it first leak, ensuring the haters had built up a full head of steam, and then failed to have any well choreographed official announcement and discussion is a mystery to me.  All I saw was a long list of Adobe bloggers trying in what looked like a more or less independent way to convey what a good thing the announcement was.  How could they not realize every hater and link baiter in the land would be publishing headlines like, “Steve Jobs Wins” or “Steve’s Last Laugh.”  Adobe is not the first company that needed to de-invest in a product.  Why on Earth did they not find a way to follow the normal policy most companies have to avoid this kind of thing, which is to quietly wind down development while “sunsetting” the product?  Were they really that desparate to shave a few more jobs in their recent layoffs or just that dense?

This PR issue is closely related to Adobe’s misunderstandings about its customers and Flash.  Flash customers are a tribe.  They’re not cogs in the Adobe Machine.  Too often executives at Big Companies like Adobe think they can slice and dice their customers as easily as moving the formulas around on their spreadsheets.  Their knowledge of their customers starts to be limited to their spreadsheets.  They figure if Jack Welch got to be the world’s greatest CEO by only allowing investments in areas where they can be #1 or #2, all they have to do is kill anything that isn’t #1 or #2.  But that’s different from what Welch did because killing those things ignores the idea that there may be an important connection between the less-important-on-the-spreadsheet and the killer-strategic-things.  Just because no formula links the two doesn’t mean there isn’t a link in the Real World.  If you have an audience that’s loyal to Flash and you kill something important to that audience as you did here, even if it was only important for the sake of pride and being able to hold your head up, you lose.

But there are much broader and more strategic issues surrounding Flash that Adobe did not understand.  Chief among those was how rapidly smartphones would become critically important devices on the web.  According to ex-Flash manager Carlos Icaza, half of the Flash team were carrying iPhones in 2007, yet Adobe completely botched the User Experience on these phones until very recently.  Botched how?  By failing to make Flash graphics take proper advantage of whatever native graphics capability was available for the device.  How could it have taken so many years to get something as simple and widely used as video to play well on these devices?   We’ll get to the misunderstanding of the Haters and the Press soon, but doing video well is one of the main reasons Flash got where it is and one of the main things the Haters hated about Flash on Mobile.  Adobe let a Bad UX of epic proportions go on for years, and it just wasn’t that hard to fix or HTML5 wouldn’t have been able to make Flash look so bad there.

Adobe’s other strategic mistake is they are confused about who the Flash user is.  I don’t mean the consumer, but the user or customer that actually pays Adobe money.  Adobe  is a company that sells to Designers.  They like to talk Development Tools, but they are largely Design Tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver.  The really key aspects of Flash are Developer-focused.  You can’t do much with it that isn’t doable in HTML5 (and even pre-HTML5) without being a developer.  The depth of this misunderstanding can be easily seen by reading blog posts like Jesse Warden’s rant about Flashbuilder.  Flashbuilder is Adobe’s IDE for Flash.  It is the UX by which a developer experiences Flash.  If Adobe had treated its design tools as Warden says they have Flashbuilder, it would be like arguing, “Well, Photoshop has the worst UX in the land, but the bitmaps it produces are enough better than other bitmaps that you should just deal with it.”  But, since Adobe mostly cares about Designers and not Developers, they didn’t understand how bad Flashbuilder was.  After all, the Designers weren’t complaining about it, and the Developers are just the dweebs who do the Designer’s bidding.  In fact, they went out of their way to cater to the workflows Designers prefer in Flash.  They even invested in building a tool called Catalyst to give Designers more power in the Flash world.  What a pity those investments didn’t go to making Flashbuilder the most phenomenal Developer’s UX out there.

There are so many areas where having a Developer’s hat on instead of a Designer’s hat could have made Flash better.  Why, for example, is there no decent Flash equivalent to node.js?  Cold Fusion?  Fail.  I shouldn’t have to buy more stuff to write server Flash.  It should be possible in the same IDE I am writing client Flash in.  Adobe, your mission is to sell gold pans and jeans to the Internet Gold Miners.  Developers are a critical part of that equation and you’re squandering a powerful tool there.

When I mentioned Flash’s customers are a Tribe, this is closely related to the fact that they are Developers.  They may be more Tribe-like than any other group Adobe deals with.  Have you checked the Internet lately to see how often Developers hang out and influence each other?  Have you seen unique properties like Stackoverflow?  Have you seen that the advent of Evangelists for Software started with Developer tools at places like Microsoft and my old alma mater Borland?  Developers are a tribe!

Flash is Misunderstood by Apple

There is no doubt that Steve Jobs stuck a knife in Flash’s side that hurt it badly.  He was articulate about his reasons, and it hurts me to say that he was right, and that being so slow was tragically avoidable by Adobe as I’ve discussed.  They just didn’t get it.  Shame on them.

But even as Steve Jobs was right, he was also wrong.  He was wrong for doing this because he wanted revenge on Adobe’s disloyalty to Apple, as is mentioned in his Biography.  He was wrong for doing this as much to help build his Walled Garden as to ensure better UX on iOS.  Flash was a terrible threat to the Walled Garden.  You can build any application in it and run that app from the browser (or at least you could once Adobe woke up and fixed the performance problems so Flash games like Technarium could flourish on iOS).  The world already wants to bypass the 30% tax that Apple places on any iOS app.  Giving it a powerful tool to do just that was unacceptable.  Flash had to be brought to heel.

But…

If we drag out our dog-eared copy of Mario Puzo’s the Godfather, Steven P. Jobs was short-sighted to have settled for simply killing Flash in mobile browsers.   He should have taken control of it.  He would have been far better off to ban it as he did, and then work hard at getting Adobe to fix the performance problems and to get them agree to letting Apple control which browser apps could be tolerated on iOS.  Then he could have brought them back in true conqueror fashion.  This would’ve opened the door to letting video, richer website UI, and other decidedly free things through while opening the door for Apple to control even browser apps since they’d need sign off from Apple.  As we learned from the Godfather, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Apple also would’ve benefited from a much slower burn on how fast HTML5 is coming to fruition.  It still has a long ways to go to catch Flash.  The best strategy for the Walled Gardens is to fragment the market for things like HTML5.  Maximize the noise and confusion.  Find a way to get even more alternatives into the mix.  These other technologies are all alternate platforms you don’t control.  They’re things that can wrest control away from your platform if they were ever to catch on sufficiently well and managed by the right evil strategic genius.

Flash and Adobe are Misunderstood by Google

It’s ironic that Adobe thinks the most important Flash constituents are Designers and not Developers, while Google, the best Web Monopoly on the Planet only sees Developers and not Designers, and hence has little interest in Adobe or Flash.  Google should have bought Adobe years ago.  What better way to cement their hegemony over the Web than to own many of the key design tools?  What better way to fix their Customer Service and Corporate/Enterprise selling issues than to buy a company that can do both?

Putting that can of worms aside for the moment, how could Google allow Flash browser support on mobile to die?  Don’t they realize this is as much a referendum on Android as it is Flash?  After all, Adobe is effectively saying, “There isn’t enough non-iOS Flash activity on mobile browsers to be worth carrying on”.  Or if you prefer, “iOS is so much more important than Android that even though they’ve treated us shabbily and you have stood by us, we’re going to cave in to them.”  If Google had to make an investment themselves, even a small investment to facilitate the sunsetting, they should have done so.  They could have built Flash into the Android platform.  Google also doesn’t understand the Tribe vs Cog view of Customers else they wouldn’t have done some of the things they have to their own products.

Flash is Misunderstood by the Haters and the Press

Haters gonna Hate, and that’s a misunderstanding all by itself.   I lump them in with the Press, because in many ways, the Press is gonna Press, which is to say, their job isn’t to understand, report fairly, or any of the other reasons we think we read them.  It’s to sell ink.

Still, it is amazing how often the press just doesn’t seem to understand what Flash is.  Take Harry McCracken’s post, “The Long National Nightmare With Flash is Over.”  Harry did his job linkbaiting, but his article is a great introduction to many of the misconceptions of the press and the haters:

• “Watching video was frequently like going to see a movie at a theater with a projector that keeps breaking down.”  Harry, I get that experience frequently today on my desktop.  I get it even more frequently on my Flash-less iPhone.  How often are these things simply a matter of a lousy mobile network connection?  Yes, Adobe made it much worse by taking so long to fix video, but if you think the non-Flash world really does so much better, we have to agree to disagree.
• “Bits and pieces of user interfaces didn’t work, and was often painfully obvious that they were designed for mouse input, not fingertips.”  No duh.  And HTML5, which is the write-once run anywhere successor to Flash, is going to fix the fact that the folks using the tools don’t always design for all platforms how?  The fact is, one problem Flash faced, no matter how well it worked, was it exposed the fact that a lot of content is lousy on mobile through no fault of Flash.  Harry, did you never see an HTML page that was impossible on a mobile device, especially a phone?  Have you dealt with browser incompatibilities which are back with a vengeance with HTML5?  Have you landed on a site only to have it tell you they don’t even support your browser, which may have huge market share?  How about that dreaded Android “fragmentation.”  I know you’ve heard of that, you know that these problems are not unique to Flash.  In many ways, Flash was doing the best job of minimizing them until the whole mobile schism started it up again.  More about that in my next post.
• “Certain things did perform as promised, but I never knew whether they would until I tried, and none of them were exciting enough to make up for all the hassle.”  Harry, did you never really want to access a piece of content, knowing full well it would be lousy, but lousy being better than no access at all?  I have, many times on my iPad.  I’ve gone to sites that would’ve been fine if I could’ve just gotten past a screen or two.  No dice without Flash.
• “Why, oh why, would a company like RIM triumphantly run pricey TV ads focused on Flash support?”  Well Harry, because there are people who actually like having Flash access.  Pity those poor fools now, I know.
• “In fact, it ended up benefiting them, because site owners and software developers who couldn’t use Flash ended up using other technologies–HTML5 and native iOS apps–that actually worked.”  This is the big lie:  Don’t worry your pretty little heads, because HTML5 and native iOS always work really well and Flash never really worked at all.

Flash was always a lot more than video and cheezy web site animations, but the press has never gotten that and Adobe has never successfully communicated it.  I’ll say more soon.

Next Post:  How Should Flash Be Understood?

Postscript

Flex Open Sourced

Still trying to parse what this one means.  If Adobe hadn’t made these other announcements and proven themselves very untrustworthy, it would be easy to view this as a great thing to do.  Developers prefer Open Source, so having Flex be Open is a positive.  Where I would be cautious is in evaluating whether or not Adobe is using this as an excuse to reduce their investment in Flex.  Were they to continue making the same investment and Open it as well, you’d have to like that outcome.  The only language we have is this:

This project will be jointly led by some developers from the Flex SDK engineering team along with key developers from the Flex community, including members of the Spoon Project and contributors from enterprise companies currently using Flex. Flex SDK feature development will continue under a new governance model and Adobe will continue to contribute to the Flex SDK.

I have a hard time not reading that as Adobe reducing their investment in Flex and using the Open Source community as their excuse for why it’s okay.  Certainly the comments on that post are uniformly negative.  There is an additional entry that is also troubling:

In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development. We also know that, currently, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles.

Taken together, that looks to me like fair-warning to SaaS companies and Enterprise Developers that Adobe is not interested in helping.  I wonder what this means to companies like Workday and Salesforce that have invested heavily?  It’s really unclear to me how they can reconcile this statement about Rich UI Enterprise Apps and have much room left for the future.  What’s left, just games delivered as apps?  At some stage, they have to decide whether they’ve sunset the whole Flash armada, or whether they will make a stand somewhere.  It’ll take years even if they have sunset for it to truly be done, but the way they’re handling roadmaps and announcements will hasten that sunset.

Mike Chambers on Flash

Probably the most detailed discussion yet from Adobe on why they did what they did. The emphasis is on AIR applications, not browser apps for Flash going forward. He doesn’t say this exactly, but if you follow his logic to its obvious conclusions, and factor in issues like OSX App Store and IE8 not supporting Flash by default, that’s the conclusion.

The comments on this thread are very unhappy, like most of the others. If nothing else, Adobe must be hearing loud and clear that they have, to use Reed Hasting’s expression, “let down their customers.”

How Should We Think of Flash Going Forward?

The second part of my two part series on Flash.