* Posts by tr00don

3 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Sep 2011

Adobe bets on Flash 11 to fend off HTML5 invasion

tr00don

Well, in the beginning Flash was OK. You got small (~5 KB) applets that did 2D vector graphics, including animation. Those looked great.

tr00don

Microsoft had an alliance with desktop/laptop makers which worked for all of them because they achieved volume, market dominance. Now Microsoft are striking a similar alliance with Nokia for handsets but Nokia are no fools: their leverage is Meego, they made sure to show it off first, and the message for Microsoft is clear: "We get to negotiate the price for installing Windows Phone on our devices." If this works out then in afew years we will probably see Windows Phone become dominant in the mobile market, with relatively cheap apps and devs readjusting their life stile for worse.

On a similar note, a similar trend exists on the Web front. Google sell Web services so they need to commoditize the devices/OS that provide access to these services, hence the "free" Android OS (sorry, no source lately, competitors cannot take a peek anymore). All those Asian device makers fight for market dominance but all they will achieve is give Google what they need.

tr00don

commodities

Both Apple and Microsoft now reject Flash; it's called commoditization. Apple sell hardware (OS and development tools included) and Microsoft sell the dominant OS and development tools. But their producs are useless without applications. In order to maximize profits, both companies need to minimize the cost of applications. Apple squeeze iOS applications through an approval process whereby they control the price of each app, veto its content, and collect 30% of the revenue; on Mac OS X the implementation of a similar process seems to be underway. Microsoft are caching up by implementing the "dual model" in Windows 8: Metro apps will be similar to iOS apps and "classic" apps will stick to the Windows 7 model. Notice that Java and Mono applications are not directly under attack as development tools for these are free, something that Adobe cannot afford to do for AIR/Flash.