The Business of the Flash Platform

A financial analyst recently found me on the web. He works for an independent company that collects data on market trends and then sells reports to other companies.

We had spoken once before about Adobe's Omniture acquisition. I told him about the differences between infinite digital goods and scarce goods. The software that Adobe sells is, unfortunately, a digital good that can be easily and infinitely copied. It is going to be harder and harder, over time, to sell digital goods.

Things like services and premium support are scarce goods. They cannot be easily copied and distributed. Over time I believe that all business models will move to giving away digital goods in order to promote the sale of scarce goods. I know that I'm not completely drinking my own Kool Aid yet, but look for more on that in the next six months or so.

Adobe's Acquisition of Omniture is one way of adding more scarce goods to the company's services. Collection, tracking, and analysis of data is something not easily shared, distributed, and copied.

Today the analyst is asking me about the open screen project and Max Announcements. I thought I'd post my thoughts because I could. :-)

[I] wanted to see what you thought about [the] announcements on Flash-Flash player 10.1, traction with the Open Screen Project and push to smartphones in early 2010, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, using Flash to develop iPhone apps, etc.

Any of this material in your mind, and will it help Adobe fight off competition and increase its share of creative pros, designers and developers?

One of the benefits of the Adobe Flash Player on the web is that it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere; and in most cases you can safely assume that if you build in Flash, people can view it on their desktop computer. However, the 'world' is changing and smart phones are increasingly becoming common as the medium of choice. Adobe's movement with the Open Screen Project is a way to extend Flash's ubiquity and keep Flash relevant for the next 10 or more years. Will it help Adobe fight off competition? I believe so.

Will it help Adobe increase it's developer base? I'm not quite sure. But, I do believe it will help smart phones increase their developer base. A lot of desktop or web based applications currently built on the Flash Platform will be ported to mobile devices as a competitive advantage. Accessibility of an app is a competitive advantage.

He also asked me about HTML5. IS HTML5 a threat to the Adobe Developer Ecosystem? At this time, HTML5 is not a real threat, for the same reasons previous HTML standards are not consistent. Until the browser compatibility issues are solved once and for all, I don't think anything in the HTML space will disrupt the Flash Platform dominance.

If Firefox and IE were to switch over to a web kit based browser, that would be hugely earth shaking, because most major browsers would use the same rendering engine. But, I'm not holding my breath for that one.