John Nack: ‘Sympathy for the Devil’

Thoughtful piece from Adobe’s John Nack on Flash. Nack works for Adobe, but on Photoshop, not Flash. The whole thing is worth reading because I think he’s genuinely trying to be fair about the whole situation. But this bit betrays a bit of pro-Adobe mindset:

And today, more than 15 years after Netscape debuted, Flash remains the only way to, say, display a vector chart across browsers (i.e., such that you can count on every viewer seeing it). That’s sad — especially given that Adobe plowed a hell of a lot of time and money into trying to get the open SVG standardized and adopted.

The real situation is that today, two and a half years after the iPhone debuted, web developers can no longer count on every viewer being able to render Flash. The percentage of web user agents with Flash installed is now going down, not up. My money says that trend is permanent, and further, it’ll reach a tipping point in the not-so-distant future and Flash will turn into something like Internet Explorer.

★ Friday, 29 January 2010