Thoughts about Flash announcement and impact on our business, reporting from the frontline trenches. (Part 1)

If you are like me, it feels like a bomb just went off far ahead, first there was a short moment of silence, then noise (a lot of noise) and then, the aftershock.


Measuring Impact on our business

The first thing that I want to say to businesses out there is: do not get in panic mode.

Flash is not dead (at least not yet) and HTML5 is a cool technology, but not so fast… as a business who’s primary focus has been the Flash Platform, we have naturally started analyzing how this announcement affects current and future projects with some of our clients and how it may threaten our business.

First, truth be told, the killing of Flash on the Mobile browsers has had no effect on us, we never had any projects targeting mobile browsers and nor seem like any of our clients were interested in going in that direction. Everything regarding mobile and tablets has always been around creating content to be consumed as an Application and IOS has been always the primary target. Adobe AIR is all we needed to achieve this.

Second, Some people say that eliminating the Flash Player for mobile will accelerate the death of the Player on the Desktop, but I think this is not true. Just try to make your sites, and especially applications to be cross-browser compatible, add to that support just to IE 7 and you will see what I mean. However, I think the use of Flash for informational sites, will be declining. There are a lot of use cases in that space where I see a clear benefit to using HTML.

We’ve looked into what it would take to transform some of the flash enterprise applications we’ve built in the past, into HTML5 and for the most part, at least at this moment is not worth the effort, particularly when we think about making those apps cross browser compatible on the desktop, is possible but what about the cost? Also if you need Audio and Video it’s pointless, even Gtalk still relies on Flash for that at the moment.


The facts from the right sources

I pointed people to Mike Chambers, Lee Brimelaw and Ben Forta for reliable information in my twitter account earlier this week and that still stands. These are guys I respect among other people in the industry that has been there, for a long time and work for Adobe. Mike C. made it clear that you should look into HTML5 for enterprise applications in the future, but people took that comment very literal. Trust me, he did not mean NOW, he meant “Long Term”. 


What does long term mean?

Evaluate who is your target audience, business requirements the kind of user experience do you want to deliver and longevity of the technology you will use. if HTML5 covers your corners, I think the choice is obvious. 


In conclusion, the best advice I can give to anyone reading this is: if you want create a compelling experience for your users, you should not worry about wanting to replace Flash just to replace Flash, the question is: What kind of experience do you want to deliver to your audience and use the technologies available that will help you achieve that experience.

Flash is still the most successfully and widely deployed plug-in to date and that will not change overnight.

+LA