Firstly I’d like to make clear that I am in no way affiliated with Adobe either in the Flash or CF sense – I am a user of both products and, like so many others, work for a company who has based its business on the Adobe development stack.
I have no idea what prompted Adobe’s rather rapid dumping of Flash on mobile devices but the immediate impact on me and my employers should be minimal. That said, I wanted to take a look at how Adobe managed this announcement and the wider impact it could have on the community.
Flash’s position has been seemingly tenuous for the best part of a year now – ever since Apple announced that they could live without it the web development world was exposed to a reality that did not contain 99.8% support for Flash Player and the concept that there is something else out there that does what Flash does.
Entire businesses have been built around the Flash platform both in the RIA sphere as well as games development (an arena that was ripe for mobile application) and more.
The announcement by Adobe on the 8th November that they would be dropping Flash for mobile devices was actually filled with positives – a greater focus on Air for mobile bringing apps to the platform, a greater contribution to HTML 5 technologies and the already announced improvements to the desktop platform. On the face of it “no more mobile Flash” doesn’t look like such a bad thing
But that isn’t how the message was received and this is due in no small part to Adobe’s lack of management of the announcement.
Firstly there was confusion – a rippling wave of Chinese whispers that hinted at the death of flash entirely, risk to the Flex / Air platforms even down to a complete abandoning of web dev technology by the Adobe execs… all of it misguided or inaccurate but still pinging round twitter, blogs and news sites.
Then came the responses – equally muddled – from Flash pros and Adobe community members claiming total confusion over the decision and compounding the lack of clarity surrounding what should have been a simple enough announcement.
Finally came the clarification from the Adobe team and their evangelists … which came too late.
The damage had been done. Flash devs, ColdFusion devs, Air and Flex devs and the rest of the Adobe development ecosystem were embroiled in a debate about the envisaged future of the company / platform and the evangelists attempts to calm everyone down simply added fuel to the furore.
Where did Adobe go wrong? Simply enough – they didn’t factor in the potential impact on an already fragile community. An announcement of any change in Flash policy should have been accompanied by a complete package of conferences, Q&A sessions. In short change management needed to be much more in depth than a simple blog post.
This was an announcement that was followed by Friday’s 680 Jobs to Go at Adobe headline which only served to contribute to the reduction in confidence in Adobe as a provider. And that may sound a little dramatic but even I spent a good portion of that weekend undertaking a dependency assessment with regards to our attachment to Adobe’s platform offerings.
I know that ColdFusion isn’t going anywhere any time soon and even if it does get axed or marginalised by the Adobe higher ups the Railo community is strong enough to take up any slack and fill any void that may be left but still, confusion and lack of clear communication creates risk and panic at a very real business level. This is something Adobe should really be well aware of and should have managed better.
So is Flash dead? Nope.
Is ColdFusion dead or dying? Absolutely not!
Did Adobe complete fumble the handling of this situation?
You bet your ass they did!