Steve Jobs’ Legacy: Phase 1, Flash Finale

“Adobe Bows in Office Feud,” so reads the headline of the front page article in today’s Wall Street Journal in the Marketplace section. The gist is that Adobe will no longer attempt to push Flash for browsers that come with smart phones and tablet computers and will increase its support of HTML5.

The WSJ article is a great recap of the genesis of the Adobe/Apple feud, which began in 1999 when Adobe refused to create a Mac version of their program “Premiere,” which taught Steve Jobs that he never wanted to be in a business where he did not control both the hardware and software.

While Flash will still be supported on current Android devices, future development will not happen. Flash will be relegated to gaming applications and premium video services. Basically this is the formal acknowledgment that Flash is history on the web.

We will be recommending to our clients and other businesses that currently have Flash components in their websites, to replace the Flash — sometime over the next year, with a better supported technology, which is currently Javascript, and subsequently the emerging HTML5 standard.