Insights

Apple, Flash and the new development realties

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I usually don’t comment on technology platforms but the situation between Adobe and Apple is going to affect the entire landscape of web, mobile and pad device development. If you click on the link above you will find a open letter from Apple CEO Steve Jobs that makes his case for not running Flash based products on his mobile devices. I will let him explain his position but what it means to Decision Counsel and many of our clients is that as we continue to develop products for mobile users and devices; the Apple platforms will require unique and separate development efforts. This is significant because the iPhone continues to build on its significant market share and the iPad platform has received an enthusiastic reaction from its users. In short, Apple is too big to be ignored.

The reason this presents such a pressing concern to our community is that 70% of the rich media used on the web is flash based. Additionally Adobe tools are used to produce a significant amount of the worlds web sites. While I believe PC based web browsing will not be affected by this battle, mobile device development surely will. To that end Decision Counsel has launched a mobile development initiative that will focus entirely on touch screen, mobile device and pad/tablet computing. We are going to focus primarily on i-Phone, Blackberry and Android Environments with some consideration of Windows and Symbian if they begin to gain market share. It’s time we put our money where our rhetorical mouth has been.

Whether you are just starting your mobile applications development or looking to evolve existing products, I would recommend examining this battle between Adobe and Apple, it will be a strategic issues for all of us. The silver lining to all of this is that the mobile media content market is still nascent and evolving. It would have been great if there was one master development platform that allowed us to “write once, publish to all” but it does not exist. (perhaps HTML 5 tools will evolve to that point) I hope you find the article as compelling as I did. Steve Jobs has clearly decided to challenge the industry to consider mobile a separate animal in the same way the web was considered in 1995. I remember back then we would always say “but its still just content right” we discovered it was a lot more than that back then and I think we will again.

Best Sal