I was watching Kevin Lynch’s presentation on the goals of Adobe for future deployments of AIR and he demonstrated the desired path for Adobe. He talked about the new Open Screen alliance and the goals of a unified flash player and a unified AIR runtime deployed across the many partners and devises.
Kevin specifically mentioned that Adobe would imagine a workflow where developers would build an application for a mobile devise running within the AIR runtime and be able to deploy the same application to a pc as well. The mockup images below show the Adobe media player running on a devise and then the same application running on a Windows desktop.
I am really excited about the announcement of the new Open Screen project from Adobe, but again there is no sign of Apple.
The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.
So, if the Flash Player is good enough for nearly every other cell phone manufacturer, what is Mr. Jobs problem? Your thoughts?
First let me say that I love my MacBook and am a big supported of Apple. However, after reading the post about Pandora on cnet I am a little concerned. The context of the article is just speculation at this point about how enabling Flash on the iPhone could be a revenue hit to Apple. Pandora allows users to listen to and bookmark music streaming within the browser via the Flash Player. It then allows users to purchase their bookmarked music from either Amazon.com or Apple through iTunes.
The article speculates that if the iPhone or iPod touch had the Flash Player, users would simply go to Pandoa.com and play music from their bookmarks and stations without the need to ever purchase. This seems like a valid concern however if this is truly a reason why Apple is blocking the Flash player, then I have to say I am very disappointed.
Mr. Jobs, don’t play the old games of our friends in Redmond WA, just make it a better experience to continue to purchase music and users will continue to line up with dollars in hand. To hold back technology simply to protect your assets is not something I would expect from Apple.
First it was the iPhone that at least in the current version doesn’t have the Flash Player (although it is rumored to be getting it in the near future), now we have the Open Handset Alliance fostered by Google and still no Adobe presence in the list of members. It would seem like joining the alliance would be a good way to get the Flash Player and in time the AIR runtime onto more handsets.
Perhaps I am way off base and maybe there are politics at play here but I was really hoping to see Adobe in the Open Handset Alliance.