No Boundaries

I must admit that I’m getting more and more exasperated with the Apple v Adobe war that has been raging for about a half of a year now. I’m sure that I don’t have any idea as to the direction that the Internet may be taking in the near future and I’m equally sure that no-one else does either. I think that the original scheme was that the internet would become a set of pipes which delivered expensive curated content to a few walled-gardens where those loyal to the particular hotel-keep would consume in contented oblivion while shelling out a considerable sum on a monthly basis for devices, connections, apps, emags and eshows, bumpers and all other necessary appurtenances. Beyond the walled gardens would be a virus-ridden, porn-infested, aesthetically-unappealing hell that best be left alone by any of any common sense. The internet would be third-world in character, as if crafted by the likes of Joan Didion or Somerset Maugham.

Google and it’s Android have busted this all wide open, sending Palm into the arms of HP and everybody else back to the drawing board. Long live liberation.

This would be good and nice, were it true, but it is complicated by Apple’s success in widely distributing both the iPad and the iPhone, the failure to launch, thus far, of all but a few Android devices which can hope to rival Apple’s creations, and Adobe’s failure to fully grasp the true condition that it’s condition is in.

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I need to both: wrap-up Sundance while I can still remember all of  it, and post my Vancouver images from last November. But I’m currently enthralled, although less and less every day, with the above-titled phenomena.  And I mean phenomena in the scientific sense of the term. I think business schools will be studying exactly what happened over the last week-and-a-half  for a long time to come.  My focus has shifted from the merits of Flash, which was the core of the debate, to Twitter, social marketing campaigns and how everything is very different these days.

My personal opinion about what happened is:  Apple, having opposing lines of business: selling gizmos and selling stuff that runs on gizmos, crossed something of a rubicon.  They were faced with either marketing their device with an obvious and important feature missing or giving up the ability to control and monetize all sorts of things that run on the device.

Apple chose a bold and aggressive path.  They targeted Flash as very bad for almost anything (or Adobe as lazy at any rate) and themselves as providers of a forward-looking salve to the badness in having excluded it. Once that sort of argument is made, retreat isn’t likely. None of this is good for Adobe, but I think, in many ways, it has turned out worse for Apple.

Fresh from a Sundance seminar on social-network marketing, I quickly installed my Tweetdeck when I first heard of the missing Flash content. With the search terms Flash and Ipad, I monitored, every now and then, as the tweetstream unfolded. This proceeded and has outlasted any conventional media coverage and, to me, was just incredible in both sheer volume and the varied directions of the content.

The tweets took three general forms:

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The second thing which just came up last week was the newly interminable issue of Flash vs the Ipad. This rhetorical phenomena has caused me to download tweetdeck and even tweet, if only a morsel or five. Six maybe. Seven. But I intend to put away the tweetdeck as soon as everything dies down. It is moments like these when the twittery is most hyperbolic. I think both sides are a bit full of it on this one.

The current status of the debate, per my little tweetdeck, is: “Flash is terribly buggy and an historical web practice already” vs” the internet will consist of vast holes filled with blue lego icons if Flash is excluded”.

Quietly, yesterday, Communications Arts selected a webpick of the day (26000 Vodka) that puts almost all four trillion of these tweet-rants, on both sides, to rest. The concept is degradation.  This, simply put, is: knowing that not everything can be supported on every platform, a developer can present the lowest common denominator technology first, determine if a more sophisticated technology is supported (either by asking the user to choose or directly evaluating which technologies are supported on the device), and then make use of the highest level of technology that will work or that the user finds most comfortable.

In the majority of cases, it’s not all that more difficult to build a site that will provide the best experience that the current technology can provide (using Flash, Silverlight or whatever) , and degrade to something that will offer a less vibrant and innovative, though stable, experience on devices which don’t support those technologies.

So neither the “Flash is dead”, nor the “myriad of lego boxes” arguments have merit. A lesser tier of content will make it’s way to the Ipad via the web.  The App Store will be the source of any sophisticated stuff which runs on the device, and this will be entirely preselected by Apple. Hulu likely will never be welcome.

This will be a good thing for Flash beyond the Ipad controversy because currently many netbooks and other gizmos are not well suited for running large Flash applications.

Beyond this relatively simple and elegant solution, here are a few of my thoughts:

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