Adobe’s recent announcements regarding the fate of Flash Player on mobile devices has sparked a significant debate on a wide variety of related topics. I started sharing my reactions earlier, in a separate post on the manner in which these announcements were made public, because I feel that those comments represent an accurate summary of the managerial incompetence recently illustrated by Adobe, whereas what follows in this post is all guesswork.

Is Flash Dead?

Adobe’s recent announcements on mobile Flash have led many to conclude that the death of Flash (rumored for over a decade) has finally come to pass.

So, is Flash dead?

The answer is, unfortunately, complicated, because ‘Flash’ is actually a complex array of inter-related technologies, most importantly:

• SWF, or the file format of compiled Flash experiences
• The Runtimes
• The Flash Player, or the plugin that plays SWF content inside of a browser
• AIR, or the Adobe Integrated Runtime, which is what is used to deliver Flash experiences as applications
• The Authoring Tools
• Flash Professional, which is the tool primarily used to design and animate Flash experiences, and includes full support for code (but not optimized for developers)
• Flash Builder, which is the tool used by coders to program Flash experiences
• There are other authoring tools for Flash, as well, but these are the two primary ones from Adobe
• The Frameworks, like Flex, which are utilized to accelerate and standardize ActionScript 3 development

So, given this landscape, when people ask ‘is Flash dead?’, you can see why the answer may be a little complex. I think that, what most people mean when they ask the question, is whether Flash Player is dead (most people still don’t even understand that Flash can run outside of the browser, using something called AIR).

Yes, Flash Player is (Almost) Dead

I believe that the short answer to this is, yes, the Adobe Flash Player is now, effectively, a dead technology, from a mass market perspective (the situation may well be different in specific niches, like gaming and enterprise).

Why do I think this?

Well, as I expressed in some length last month, the core value of Flash has always been that it runs everywhere. Yes, people use Flash because it delivers cool experiences -- but, more fundamentally, they use Flash because people can see whatever you create with it. It is certainly true (as I discussed in my recent review of Flash killers) that Apple delivered a key blow to this positioning of Flash as a ubiquitous platform. But it was not a fatal blow -- at least not until this week’s announcements from Adobe.

Adobe believes that the future of Flash Player is on the desktop, and they have set their sights on that. The thing is, the web isn’t supposed to be platform-specific that way (when was the last time anyone suggested building a Windows-only website). The web is supposed to work everywhere.

So, while Flash Player offers some amazing options for experiences in the desktop browser, the vast majority of firms and individuals will opt to exclude Flash from their websites -- simply because it will not work on a sufficient number of viewer machines. That is, there will be very little Flash Player in the browser, even for desktop viewers, precisely because it will now not function on any mobile devices.

I’m not saying there will be absolutely no browser work done in Flash -- just very, very little.

Because of the diminishing presence of Flash Player in web, there will be many fewer people learning how to work with Flash technologies. Already, Adobe lost a huge percentage of their Flash user base, when they introduced ActionScript 3 (and many Flashers were unable to keep up). And now, they will lose even more.

With the exodus of talent from Flash, there will of course be fewer resources available to create work in Flash -- or trying to sell work in Flash.

AIR

As I hoped to convey in the above intro, Flash Player and AIR are different technologies. So when I claim that Flash Player is dead, I do not necessarily believe that AIR is also dead.

Adobe has always had difficulty explaining the difference between Flash and AIR -- and this is one of the key problems with AIR. Very few people actually understand and appreciate the difference between Flash and AIR. And now that the world believes that Flash on mobile is dead -- because Adobe just spent a lot of time, money and effort saying just that -- it’s going to be very, very difficult to explain that Flash is actually a viable technology for mobile devices, through something else called AIR.

The broader market does not understand that, while Flash is dead on mobile, something else called AIR isn’t. Further, for those that do, they (quite reasonably) would question why they should believe Flash runs well as a mobile app, when Adobe itself claims that Flash does not run well as a mobile plugin. And finally, the same exodus of talent that I predict, above, will of course, influence the potential size of the market for AIR apps.

Thus, AIR’s future is in great doubt -- regardless of the quality of the engineering, or the scope of resources that Adobe puts behind the technology. AIR will only survive and succeed if people like me are able to sell it -- and that sales job has just become vastly more difficult (and the haphazard manner in which Adobe made these announcements has dramatically reduced the willingness of people like me to try to sell Adobe technology in mobile environments -- we just don’t know what massive changes in strategy Adobe has lined up around the corner). And I am unclear if Adobe is able to provide marketing and messaging necessary to support the sales of AIR apps.

Adobe should not have killed off Flash Player until Adobe figured out how to package and sell AIR as a solid solution. Adobe needed Flash Player to remain a web standard, until AIR could become an app standard. That they did not, places the future of AIR as a popular application development solution in great doubt.

Web

I think it is worth noting what all this means for the future of the web, because I think it is very easy to overlook this. Given the current discussion taking place inside the reality distortion field, too many people look at the death of Flash as a ‘good’ thing, without considering the full set of ramifications.

I don’t want to get into an HTML5-vs.-Flash discussion here again. Suffice it to say that HTML5 is just not anywhere near feature-parity with Flash. This means you can’t build stuff as cool with HTML5 as you can with Flash. And, with the immature state of HTML5 authoring tools, all the cross-browser, cross-platform consistency issues inherent in HTML, firms will have to spend more money, to create these less rich experiences.

Thus, with what I see as the impending death of Flash Player from the web, and HTML5’s clear lack of ability to fully replace Flash’s role, we're going to see a decrease in the quality of web experiences -- at least for the next few years.

What’s more, in this same period, we’re going to start to see a real differentiation in the quality of experiences that firms of different sizes are able to create. Flash was actually a leveling technology, with an economic model that enables even individuals to create cool browser apps and experiences. Because of the aspects of HTML5 I just referenced, by and large, only very large firms will be able to afford to create great browser apps and experiences (it is not a coincidence that today you see great HTML5 from firms like Google and Apple).

So I predict that one of the key results of Adobe’s recent announcements is that, for the next few years, the web will become more boring, with fewer great experiences, spearheaded by much larger firms.

As I said at the start of this post, these opinions represent my current guesses as to the future of these technologies. There's certainly plenty of room here for more perspectives, and I'd like to see what some of you think, in comments.

Until then, please share and enjoy!

-r