Why Is Adobe Abandoning Mobile Flash?

In April, the late Steve Jobs created chaos when he dissed Adobe Flash with a venom that has poisoned the atmosphere for the foreseeable future.

His article, titled "Thoughts On Flash", became an historical document as Jobs laid out his six reasons for rejecting the iconic multimedia software.

The six theses that Jobs nailed on the doors of the world wide web were:

Adobe's proprietary ownership and control over the Flash software line. (Meanwhile, Jobs was the king of Proprietary with the Apple OS and a lot more).

Full Web access. Apple's products were notorious for inability to access a host of website features. Adobe Flash claimed about 75% of the web, especially in video. Jobs took the chance to hype his own new video format.

Poor performance on mobile platforms. Adobe Flash was not working well on mobile devices. This is not in dispute.

Battery Hog. Adobe Flash eventually added support for the new H.264 decoder, which is becoming the industry standard. But without it, Flash was simply a battery hog.

Touch screen. Jobs claimed that Flash was not set up for mobile touch screens, having been designed for computer mouse action.

Jobs did not like not having control over the full magilla, including third party apps development. Jobs thought that HTML 5 was the future of apps development, and this is true. HTML 5 has possibilities that no one has even tapped into yet.

But the main problem was that Flash was developed for computers and mouses, and had not adapted to touch screens and mobile devices, plain and simple.

The Galilean had a brief forum that slightly challenged Job's contentions.

There was legitimate disagreement about H.264 as well as snorting skepticism about Jobs "concern" for web openness while Apple, itself, was notorious for doing the opposite. Finally, Job's propensity for forcing "The Apple way or the highway" was just a problem that grated on a lot of minds.

But Microsoft piled on and also refused to deal with Adobe Flash on its tablets or Windows 8 browser.

After such major rejection, the death knell was sounding for Adobe Flash.

First of all, Flash is alive!

Kind of. In a netherworld of zombie like continuation of life. The mobile plug in development is being completely abandoned. The bottom line is that Flash is not dead yet, but it is a tad too early for us all to start yelling "Long Live The HTML 5".

According to a detailed article by Alan Reiter at Internet Evolution, Adobe will continue to develop some Flash for laptops and desktop computers.

Too many websites depend on Flash and will be using it for the foreseeable future, problems and all.

Research In Motion (RIM or RIMM) is going to complete a collaboration with Adobe for one more time, with Flash 11.1 on the BlackBerry Playbook.

Adobe will focus efforts on developing software for web publishing and cloud based services. these software, services and solutions will keep the servers busy.

Adobe will be making tools that are generated with HTML 5 based code, but HTML 5 has not been optimal, either. There will continue to be birthing pains and many bad starts as HTML 5 heads toward those better days that we all dream of.

The better days for HTML 5 are this: The creation of a universal website full of jazzy features that will work on all computers and mobile devices. Even the first day of that dream is not here yet.

But, while Apple has dominated the mobile tablet markets while banning Flash, Flash is still used on devoted users of anti-Apple mobile systems and will need to be serviced.

Adobe will struggle with lost revenue and lost jobs while working through a transition to new digital products, so the results (and the return to profits) remain to be seen.

According to BusinessWeek, Adobe will cut 750 jobs in Europe and North America, which represents about 7% of the firm's workforce. Adobe shares fell about 12% and are down 8.8% for the year.

Adobe will lose some licensing revenue from corporate server software sales, but will channel resources into sales in the digital media and marketing area. As a result, income is expected to increase in the next fiscal year.

Bloomberg surveyed analysts who expect sales to increase by about 9% to $4.53 billion.