Microsoft + Adobe = Trouble for iPhone?
According to a press release from Adobe, Microsoft has licensed portable versions of Flash and Reader for use on “future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones.” While I’d hardly characterize this deal as a game-changer, it does represent a significant strike against Apple, which has recently made no secret of the fact that Flash has no place on the iPhone. (The inclusion of Reader in the deal is less significant: there are already ways to read PDFs anywhere that has a web connection.)
How much difference will this make to the high-end and enterprise cell phone buyers who drive purchasing trends? Perhaps less than Microsoft hopes. Although there is plenty of Flash content on the web, it still seems to be perceived as largely for games and window dressing by many users. Certainly there are sites that are unusable without Flash – but do you care about those sites when you’re away from your desktop? Will Flash inclusion tilt the balance towards Windows Mobile for your next phone?
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I’m not a big fan of Flash for many reasons… it’s proprietary, it can easily break interface conventions of the client device, it’s hard to index/search the content, etc., etc. I’d be just as happy if Flash didn’t exist… play videos in a true open-standard video format and use open web standards to implement pages in platform- and browser-indeoendent ways.
Flash is the last gasp for the old promotional, interactive CD crowd. It’s their only entry into the web since interactive CDs went tilt. Flash developers are the ones that have never accepted their demise, they are trying to hold on to the past – interactive CDs – I don’t blame them, it was their livelihood, and a good (but overpriced) one.
Microsoft licensed Flash Lite 3.0, not the full Flash.
In my opinion, this is:
a) useless to almost all Flash developers, except those that want to play flash video
b) giving credence to Jobs’ contention that the current crop of phones are not powerful enough to render a full-blown flash file.
c) mostly useful for press release wars and punditry…
It’s too bad Adobe killed off the desktop implementation of SVG – that XML-based graphics technology is/was perfect for scaling to mobile delivery.
Microsoft? Flash? Why not Silverlight? It’s so much better.
wtf? have any of you visited, say, a european car manufacturer’s site recently. or a little site called youtube? papervision 3d anyone? Silverlight is for losers.
I know that Windows Mobile developers have been using Flash Light lately. The Freestylwm project is coded in Flash Light, for instance. Mostly I’m seeing it crop up in attempts to give Windows Mobile devices iPhone like interfaces.
As for Adobe Reader, I can’t say I’ve ever had a decent experience reading .pdf files on a mobile device. I bought Repligo to publish documents to my Pocket PC phone. It’s not perfect, but much better than trying to get a pdf to render correctly on a 3″ screen. (It didn’t work as well on my older iPaq with 4″ screen either.)
Classic move from a value company. Microsoft doesn’t innovate instead they try and mimic what the existing market offers. Microsoft entered the market trying to compete against Blackberry. They brought a lot from their experiences with PDA’s, but it wasn’t enough. They are simply trying to hold what they have by saying “us too”. Reality is, the iPhone is disruptive. It brings a brand new and fresh look to the cell phone market. Now with full SDK, Microsoft and Blackberry are scambleing to come up with anything. Come June/July it will be amusing to watch. A tip for MSFT, Flash runtime isn’t going to save your mobile market.
We as web developers will probably notice what Microsoft does with Flash Lite on their platforms. The general public won’t notice because they won’t bother deciphering the press release.
Simply adding Flash to a device won’t even come close to something like, say, an SDK announcement. Heck, even small announcements from them get all the attention. All Apple has to do is send out an invite with some vague message like “Wear pants to this one” and it gets everyone talking for a month.
It always comes down to how much you can stir up in the press. Like Adam L. said, MS doesn’t innovate in the marketplace. Rarely is anything they do considered groundbreaking.
Its the Flash Video that really makes a difference. Flash Video has barely started to realize its potential. Hulu? DailyMotion? Veoh? Allllll Flash. Not that those copy-protected m4vs of Battlestar Galactica aren’t nice and all…