Adobe: Your Questions About Flex

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Adobe Q&A posted over the weekend (late Friday night, I think):

Is Adobe still committed to Flex? Yes. We know Flex provides a unique set of benefits for enterprise application developers. We also know that the technology landscape for application development is rapidly changing and our customers want more direct control over the underlying technologies they use. Given this, we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi. Daring Fireball's John Gruber sums this up aptly: Translation: “No.”

Adobe's Rehabilitation

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Matt Drance, writing on Apple Outsider:

Adobe’s announcement clearly states that only Flash Player for mobile is going away. The tools — the things that Adobe’s customers really turn to Adobe for — can now grow freely to please creatives in new, forward-looking ways. I truly believe that a long-term Quixotic commitment to Flash Player would have destroyed Adobe from within. It was an expired product that distracted the company from its core competency of making tools for creative professionals. Adobe still has a lot of work to do if it wants to be a real leader in modern web technology, but this is the right first step.

Adobe CEO: The Flash Argument With Apple Is Over

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John Brownlee writing for Cult of Mac:

Ouch! Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen took stage today at the All Things Digital D9 conference to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg. Watch the smug get slapped right off of Narayen’s face after he laughably tries to claim that contrary to Steve Jobs’s argument that Flash is a dead technology, it’s currently running on 130 million Android devices. Here’s the transcript.

Mossberg: What’s the deal between you and Steve Jobs? He was here last year, and he had a chance to expand on what he had previously written about Flash], and summarized, he said “Well, I think our duty is to pick technologies in the ascendancy. We feel like Flash is not on the ascendency, we think HTML 5 is, so that’s who we decided to go with for iOS Devices. What’s your respons eto that? Narayen: There are a lot of misperceptions out there. When it first broke, people talked about the fact that they thought it was a technology issue, and I think it’s become fairly clear over the last year that it’s not about the technology: it’s about a business model issue. It’s about control of a platform. It’s the control of the app store that’s really at issue here. The value proposition Flash has is that we allow people to author programs once and get them to as many devices as possible. We’ve done that with Android. We will have 130 million phone devices that will have Flash on them by the end of the year… Mossberg: And I have yet to test a single one where Flash works really well. I’m sorry. They struggle on those Android devices. Freeze frame Narayen’s face. He looks like he’s been slapped, and he just completely struggles to counter. That’s a man who knows his product sucks on mobile, and is just trying to bide his time until mobile technology becomes advanced enough that Flash’s performance issues don’t matter. [Full video. Watch the whole thing.