John Nack of Adobe on Flash: Sympathy for the Devil

Last time I checked you couldn't use Flash-based H.264 for "commercial purposes" so their domination of web video is based on looking the other way as people break their licence.

Q: What parts of the H.264 license are included when I buy Adobe Products?

A: The end user license to the Adobe Flash Player allows users to playback H.264 content for your own non-commercial use. Commercial use of the Flash Player to decode H.264 video may require a separate license.

quoted from here:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Player:9:Update:H...

Someone should lock these pirates up.

It's not just about video on the web, it's about horribly inaccessible web sites which use Flash for no apparent reason. At least it's easy to block, which removes the worst of distracting online adverts.

So it's useful they made video work, but they haven't made rich media web sites work very well. Things like accessibility and text extraction for search engines have been recent afterthoughts.

But the fact that people put significant effort into blocking your product isn't a good sign, is it? http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

"But let's also be honest and say that Flash is the reason we all have fast, reliable, ubiquitous online video today. It's the reason that YouTube took off & video consumption exploded four years ago. It's the reason we have Hulu, Vimeo, and all the rest. [...] Macromedia was the only company that delivered truly ubiquitous (99% penetration) video playback."

"truly ubiquitous": http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/vers...

I don't know where to find other (read: relevant) statistics on this topic, so if anyone else does, that'd be great to have here.

Because you can't damn well claim Flash's ubiquity to be the reason for all these several-years-old occurrences and then cite penetration statistics from 2009 as your evidence. In fact, in the absence of telling data, I'm inclined to believe YouTube taking off is more the reason for Flash's ubiquity than the other way around. But that's just a hunch-- a hunch perhaps supported by this later snippet: "[M]ore than three quarters of online video now streams in Flash formats (up from 25% three years ago)."

Additionally, it's simply illogical to claim that "[w]ithout [Flash], we'd all still be bumbling along" when the only evidence provided for said claim is ubiquity, regardless of whether Flash was anywhere near as ubiquitous as Nack leads his readers to believe.

Hypothetical scenario: Flash never existed. Now what? No other video standard would've achieved ubiquity in its place? Why is that conclusion so certainly the case? We're not talking about static technologies with substantive and unalterable differences between them. We're talking about dynamic technologies capable of changing and improving any measure of quality relatively quickly, if need be. What am I to believe next? That if the English had never survived the Middle Ages (let's say the would-be King Arthur had a sore arm one fateful day) then the world today, with absolute certainty, would not have a global language/lingua franca at all? French, Spanish, Chinese, et al. could never have done it in time for me to sit on my computer in the 21st century? That we'd all "still be bumbling along"? C'mon, Nack.