The senior years of Flash

I'm pretty sure about this. The Flash (on mobile) is dead. It can take a year, or it can take 5 years. But it's dead in terms of being a major application development platform. Native mobile apps and HTML5 (on mobile web) will take over. On the otherhand, for prototyping on mobile (and elsewhere) Flash will be still very useful.

The final nail in the coffin was unrelently hammered in by these Thoughts on Flash from Steve.

In the desktop land, the user experience on different platforms is not so critically tied to "single app in full screen" and generally the platforms use very similar conventions, i.e. mouse, keyboard, app windows, icons (WIMP).

In the mobile land, the user experience is more varied, and a point of differentiation for the platforms and vendors (e.g. HTC Sense UX on top of Android UX).

As Adobe CEO puts it, the point of Flash is "code once, run everywhere", i.e. developers not having to target particularities of platforms. And this is the exactly wrong direction to go, if the user experience on mobile has high priority. The features that are "NOT common" across mobile platforms are the ones that make the mobile apps better than the average competitor.

So, to me this is one of the defining moments.

The same way the first iMac did away with Floppy drive (used CD instead) and legacy keyboard/mouse ports (used only USB instead). It takes a lot of guts and courage to cut the cords to the past and to legacy compatibility.

...


Things to watch in the future.

The death of discs
There's no BluRay in sight for Apple laptops. Maybe there will not ever be one, in terms of something that is permanently part of the laptop. There are already USB connected external drives available. Expect MacBook Air -like laptops taking over in the future. Movies can be bought, rented and streamed over the net. Software can be installed over the net (nowadays even Adobe Creative Suite!) or via another computer.

DRM-free movies / TV?
Not sure on this one, but Steve was pretty certain music needs to be DRM free. Could it be the same for moving pictures? Or is it entirely different business model?