Adobe announced earlier today that they have decided to abandon their Flash for Mobile software in favor of developing for HTML 5 support instead. Much of the current reporting on this story is following the idea that Adobe is finally conceding a loss to Steve Jobs following their famous debate over the decision to exclude Flash support on iOS devices.
Jobs decided that HTML 5 was a better alternative to supporting media and animation over the web. Apple has a long history of abandoning technology too soon, just as they did with Firewire. In reality however, while HTML 5 does provide many advances over the previous iterations of the ubiquitous markup language, it is still years away from being completed. The timeline for the technology is already behind schedule and is not expected to receive W3C Recommendation status until the year 2022. Until that time, a large majority of websites will continue to include Flash media. In fact, some websites wrap their entire content in Flash animations. Many ads are also presented using Flash, as annoying as such ads may be.
The truth is, Adobe isn't conceding anything to Apple or Steve Jobs himself. In fact, this is simply a business decision. Just like every other industry in America, the current state of the economy is causing businesses to evaluate their current budgets and decide where they can best cut back on costs. Since there aren't any viable alternatives to Adobe's PDF or AIR technologies, Flash for Mobile was the one product they could afford to eliminate. As a result, 750 employees in Europe and North America will be let go. Even after paying severance packages and taking a hit on their unemployment accounts in the short term, the company ends up decreasing overhead costs and increasing overall revenue in the long term.
When the US economy now affects the computer technology industry, it's easy to determine that the country is serious financial trouble. The fields of computer and mobile technology have been the fastest growing industries in America for the past two to three decades, with intense competition bringing forth advancements in hardware by leaps and bounds year over year. Moore's Law has proven to be true for more than forty years now, and we're all familiar with the history of leap frogging of industry leaders like Intel and AMD, NVidia and ATI, HP and Dell and so on. And we won't be forgetting the PC vs. Mac debate anytime soon, which is now carrying over to the Android/iOS debate.
The bottom line; this decision is not based on whether Flash for Mobile is superior or inferior to HTML 5, and it's not indicative of which side won this argument. It's merely a business decision designed to increase profit margin, which is the goal of every business.
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