I recently wrote an article for DailyFinance about how Apple's (AAPL) refusal to allow Adobe's (ADBE) Flash rich media-language to run on the iPhone or iPad has made the language much less attractive to developers and companies. Now, I've lived it.
In my day job, I am in charge of Web development for a green-tech company. And when we decided it was time to refresh our home page, one thing that our developer and I agreed on was to remove Flash from it -- and eventually, from other parts of the site.
Why? Because many of our employees and customers use iPhones. As it stood, the several Flash components on our home page either showed up as blank spaces on iPhones, or didn't provide the content we really wanted to deliver. We also anticipated a time when customers, the media, industry analysts and others would be viewing our pages on iPads -- perhaps even more so than on iPhones.
In other words, we had to future-proof our site by removing Flash.
Why Bother?
Certainly, we're not alone in seeing it this way. Sure, you can use Flash and HTML 5 graphic components in tandem in a way that would show up fine on Apple devices. But why bother? It costs extra money, and the two scripting languages are increasingly similar in their capabilities to deliver very rich, browser-based content including multimedia and mini-applications.
And my wariness about Flash didn't stop at our home page. Another task I'd been given was to look for a decent Webinar software-as-a-service provider as we ramp up that aspect of our marketing effort. Guess what? A lot of these tools are built using Flash. Unfortunately, this cast a shadow over these tools, because I was unsure whether potential customers and dealers would be logging in to future Webinars using iPhones or iPads. For that reason, I was willing to consider only Webinar services not built on the Flash platform.
Am I the only marketing executive who's thinking like this right now? Hardly. What's more, this type of logic will continue to color my decision-making unless Apple relents and allows Flash on the iPad and the iPhone. The impact of my thinking -- and the similar thinking of people at millions of other businesses -- will really start to show up only in a year or two. That's when application development now in planning stages comes to fruition largely sans Flash, which now looks more and more like a mere flash in the pan.
1 Comment