Marcelo Calbucci

My first disclaimer is that I love Adobe’s product. I’ve used Adobe Premiere for the first time around 1994. I wish I were better with their product, because it allows me to unleash ideas from my brain into the screen. And that’s how Adobe has branded itself: a “creative empowerment” company. And here lies the problem with Apple and Flash. Apple doesn’t consider Flash good engineering. Adobe is offended and disagrees.

Let’s make it clear, Adobe has been directly (through Flash) or indirectly (through Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks) responsible for the most amazing websites designs to date. But the technology has grown and the delta between what was possible with and without Flash is about to switch, in other words, you’ll be able to achieve more with HTML5, CSS 3, Canvas, etc. than with Flash.

The Engineering Part

Some companies, despite what the end product is, think of themselves as software engineering companies. Microsoft makes Word, Xbox and SQL, but they don’t think of themselves as word processing, gaming or database manufacturers. They think they are applying hard software engineering to make people’s life more enjoyable and productive. Amazon is the same thing. They don’t see themselves as retailers (despite what Wall Street labels them), but as software engineers solving retail problems. And Google is probably the most software engineering driving company there is (it could be their shortcoming in the future, but that’s another post).

On the other hand you have companies like Adobe and eBay. They do make amazing products, solve some hard world problems, but they are not thinking like engineers. eBay believes engineering is a commodity and enabling commerce is what they are about. Those are not mutual-exclusive, but they choose it to be this way.

Flash/Flex Shortcomings

Most of the critique of Flash/Flex has existed for a long time. I was never an expert on the topic, but other developers and entrepreneurs were always complaining to me about the limitations and performance issues of that platform. Yes, it gave you beautiful graphics and freedom to do many things, but the trade off was a slower time-to-market, performance issues, re-inventing the wheel, etc.

It’s not easy for Adobe to fix those because they don’t have the right kind of engineers behind Flash. They have engineers who are more like me, who like the end application aspect of it, instead of engineers who admire the beauty of the language, the framework and the platform. It’s a trade-off they’ve made (likely involuntarily) a decade or more ago, and it’s too hard to change it now.

Flash/Flex is not broken. It was designed to do something else. Developers don’t want that anymore.