I’m no developer, but from vantage point, Microsoft scores one today against Apple for embracing Adobe’s flash. In fact, if the game was football, this would be a touchdown. How so?
1- As Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt is lobbying that a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! would break the Web, Microsoft shows that it can embrace another standard on mobile that competes with one of its own.
2- Of course, for any handheld to function and thrive, it needs flash… because flash is ubiquitous in online video. Video will undoubtedly drive wireless entertainment and mobile advertising. I am not saying that Apple and its iPhone will not do well on this front, but it won’t do as well as it should due to its snobbish rejection of Adobe’s flash. So in this context, MSFT just gave its own mobile OS a shot in the arm by embracing flash.
To put this all into context, from News.com:
Flash Lite has several limitations compared with regular Flash, beyond the inability to support much of Flash 9. Apple CEO Steve Jobs rather emphatically declared his disdain for Flash Lite at Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, saying Flash Lite was “not capable of being used with the Web.” Murarka declined to comment specifically on Jobs’ put-down, but noted that Flash Lite ships on 500 million mobile devices.
He did acknowledge that developers using Adobe’s Flex tools can’t build Flash Lite Web pages, although the newer CS3 suite of tools does support Flash Lite.
But one huge advantage of Flash Lite is that it’s currently available for mobile devices. Microsoft’s Silverlight for Mobile is not.
Silverlight is Microsoft’s attempt to rein in on Adobe’s position in the Web development market with Flash. Microsoft is fighting an uphill battle, though, in trying to get Web developers to build sites using its technology as opposed to Adobe’s.
Then again, I am biased, because flash is integral to WatchMojo.com on our property… but on syndication network, we are as neutral and agnostic as you can get.
We’ll have a few pieces of news pertaining to Adobe ourselves…
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March 18th, 2008 at 8:55 am
You’re not supposed to praise Microsoft. They’ll take away your blogger card.
Flash Lite was coming to Windows Mobile one way or another (it comes pre-installed on a lot of WM handsets already, although no browsers currently utilize it.) Supposedly the upcoming version of Opera Mobile will be incorporating support for it.
Perhaps another reason Jobs doesn’t want to support Flash is that he knows how embarrassingly slow it would be over the iPhone’s slow EDGE connection.