Content as Software - 2

This is a follow-up to my yesterday's post about Content as Software (CAS).

Recently, Steve Jobs said that, despite abundance of Flash-compatible content, Apple is not going to support Adobe Flash on iPod or iPad. In his words, Flash is a CPU hog. Google expressed a similar view. Why is it so? Is one of the most popular web platforms going to die in the mobile space due to turf battles, or there's something else going on here? Is CPU hogging the only problem with Flash, or are there other reasons why it is going nowhere? To find answers to these questions, I looked up Flash timeline and compared it side-by-side with browser technology developments.

Remarkably, evolution of Flash looks like a continuous effort to overcome web browser deficiencies. First, it was a simple animation engine that allowed developers to embed dynamic content into static HTML pages. Then, media play-out and limited, but certain, scripting capabilities followed. At the time, web authors could not rely on consistent browser behavior beyond the very basics. In terms of browser as an application platform, Microsoft supported ActiveX in Internet Explorer (Windows-only), while Mozilla pushed JavaScript in Netscape and its open source descendants. MP3 audio was handled by a separate browser plugin, so it was difficult, if not impossible, to use most popular media to create a coherent browser-based web experience. On top of that, session management had to rely on cookies and annoying pop-ups, which could be easily disabled by the user. If you as a developer wanted to have a live page or stream content, you had to rely on Flash to provide a stable platform for your application.

Later, more video codecs, a full-blown object-oriented scripting engine (ActionScript), and web services integration layer were added to Flash. In 2007, after the acquisition by Adobe, new versions, Flash CS3 and beyond, could run whole applications inside its own application, had integrated support for Photoshop and other Adobe graphics manipulation products, 3D animation, and etc. The software has become a software platform that itself runs within a browser application that runs on top of a sophisticated windowing operating system, either Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

A PC with plenty of electric power, processing power, memory, and storage space can easily afford this behemoth. A smartphone (or an e-book) cannot. And it doesn't need to, because its operating system, rather than a web browser, runs user applications. The OS, be it iPhone OS or Google Android, provides a consistent set of APIs that developers can rely upon when they write their code. Since browser on a mobile phone is no longer "The Web Application", but rather one of many web apps, there's no need for Flash to be a media presentation intermediary. The hog can be slaughtered.

Sales of smarphones are predicted to outnumber PCs by 2012. Unless a dramatic change in Flash architecture for mobile devices happens, the product is going to die a slow death. It's not about Steve Job's ego or his design preferences. Rather, it's about the process of creative destruction of obsolete technologies and business models.

tags: 10x, payload, information, mobile, content, software, cloud, system, evolution, niche construction, social, network