Technologies are constantly evolving, and from an era of closeness and proprietary we enter an ear of connections and shared learning. Ten years ago it was unthinkable to create a dynamic and attractive website without usage of Flash, and now we are witnessing the down of the Flash technology.
Flash was the cool kid in town, and everyone knew that. You still have html and CSS and JS, but they were no way near as advanced as Flash.
Fast forward and many security breaches and concerns about the battery consuming technology and Flash is no more.
So what happened that the mighty technology had fallen?
The immerge of a new technology
Flash didn’t demise by itself. The first crack in the technology was the birth of a new device that was going to capture the entire planet – the smartphone. Smartphones were small and very slow at the beginning, and the last thing you want is to make users waiting for a flash animation to be loaded.
Apple was one of the first companies to be very vocal about this fact.
“It’s purely technical. It’s not a very good program for mobile devices,” Leander Kahney, author of the biography Inside Steve’s Brain, tells host Guy Raz. “It’s a CPU hog, and it drains battery life very quickly, so he doesn’t want it on it.”
Then the rest of the companies followed. Can you imagine what needs to happen that a technology with such a potential to be marked as obsolete? And it only took less than 7 years? This is like Windows to not be the dominant operating system in 2027.
Three-quarters of all the video on the Net is encoded in flash,” says Kahney, who is also editor of cultofmac.com. “Almost all of the games, all the casual games — especially the really popular games like FarmVille on Facebook — they’re all encoded in Flash. Almost all of the technology world is embedded in Flash.”
Pressure from the business
The other interesting fact is no end user or customer started this technology shift, but it comes from big companies. This is fact alone is interesting to explore, and it seems that even great technologies which don’t have the support from the business won’t be able to make it.
This contradicts the free market, and “the customer is always right” – believe. And for a product manager this should be taken into an account when developing and introducing a new product to the market in the B2B category. Because Flash was a way for businesses to earn money and attract audience and once this business model turned south than everything started to fall apart.
Summary
Big corporations, which were tired by issues with the Flash, initiated the down of the Flash technology.
The main reason that played a catalyst in this process was the introduction of a new technology – the smart phone.
What you need to know is that the official end-of-life support ends this year, and if your corporate site still uses this technology, it’s not too late to convert all the animations to HTML 5.
I wonder if Intel won’t be the next victim of such trend? What do you think?
Aleks Vladimirov
Solution Engineering Manager at Thales | Senior IT Professional | Startup Mentor and Product Manager
