Living the Dream

By now you've likely heard loads of coverage about the Apple iPad, and it's positioning in the market as (depending on who you believe) a natural progression of the netbook, or a heretofore nonexistent class of device that is poised to usher in the new era of appliance based computing.

You may have also heard about a few of the shortcomings of the device in it's current form. One of these shortcomings, multitasking, I believe Apple knows has to be addressed in both the iPad and the iPhone. As both devices continue to evolve, I would expect this capability to be pushed out to users with a new generation of hardware.

The other shortcoming that nearly every list includes is the lack of Flash support in the browser. Here, I don't think there's any chance that Apple will ever turn around. They've drawn their line in the sand, and as the initial shock of not having support for such a core web component has worn off, much of the argument for Flash being a core web component has started to lose momentum.

Adobe Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow published a now infamous blog post about the iPad's lack of Flash support that prompted Wired to declare that Adobe had resorted to "playing the porn card" in an effort to put pressure on Apple to revisit their decision.

It's worth noting that Lee has since updated the original post to include the disclaimer that the blog post was his own, and not an official "Adobe" blog.   I would imagine that this update itself was prompted by Lee's own desire for self preservation within Adobe.   Having been a member of the Adobe team for 8 years myself, I can assure you it's not a freewheeling corporate culture.

All this aside, the real issue in play is the continued relevance of Flash on the web, particularly in an HTML5 world, and the desire that Apple has to maintain strict control of their ecosystem.    Let's look at these two issues independently for a few minutes.

Where does Flash fit?

You can remember a time, I'm sure, when the temptation existed to develop content in Flash for the web because it allowed you to eliminate inconsistencies in behavior and display caused by lack of adherence to standards by the major browser vendors.   Like them or not, Microsoft was always the worst offender in this area, choosing to attempt to define their own standards and attempt to "lock in" users once they were hooked.   It's smart business – but horrible for the overall well being of the web.    That's not Microsoft's fault – but rather it's the fault of their customers (corporate customers in particular) who allowed themselves to be sold solutions that offered no vendor independence.    This is the very reason why IE6 still continues to exist today.    There are too many legacy systems deployed in large corporate environments where it's simply not cost effective to migrate away from these non standard solutions.

Now, though, even Microsoft is trying to encourage their customers to move toward standards based technologies and away from IE6.    The continued support of this legacy technology has started to burden the company that once championed it, and it's no longer good business to ignore that there are better solutions available.

Instead, now it's Adobe who is in the position of trying to keep users locked in to a proprietary solution for something that can more easily and effectively be done via video encoding/embedding standards available to any browser that wants to adhere to them.    All without the need of a separate plugin, within the browser itself.     Make no mistake that Adobe sees this as a huge threat to the dominance that Flash has enjoyed in the "video on the web" space for so long, at a time when "video on the web as a replacement for traditional content" as a concept is really just starting to click for the average user.    

Where Adobe has leverage with Flash is (in my opinion) the desktop application space.   Adobe AIR   is a fabulous technology that, through the use of Flash, allows developers to build desktop class applications for deployment across multiple systems, eliminating the need to worry about what client OS is being used.   There is a tremendous built in development community who have spent years developing Flash applications for the web, and there is already solid user familiarity with the technology.    The transition makes sense, and it's one that Adobe would be wise to embrace, and put more marketing muscle behind pushing.    

Apple's Role

For Apple, the motivation behind ignoring Flash on these devices has little to do with being so magnanimous as wanting to champion open standards video on the web.    For Apple, it's the sheer terror of allowing that very same application style development that I just mentioned in to their very closed iPhone/iPad ecosystem.    If you've seen the quality of HTML5 based web applications in mobile safari (see the recently launched Google Voice app as a great example) then you know that Apple already has their hands full fighting off an App Store threat that is going to continue to grow as developers tire of the restrictiveness of the App Store submission process.    Add to this the potential of increasing that rouge developer base AND providing access to essentially an already built app catalog via Flash and it's easy to see that there's no way it's ever coming to either device.

Where do they go from here?

For Adobe, Flash as a source of video on the web will continue to stick around for a while to come.   It has upwards of 80% of the web video market now, and those kinds of huge numbers are unlikely to take a nosedive quickly.    Still, as Robert Scoble himself illustrated, this shot across the Flash bow by Apple has only served to remind content producers that Flash simply isn't the only game in town (nor even the best game in town) anymore.    Adobe would be wise to start thinking long term about where the platform is headed.    Most technologists would agree that eventually (there would be disagreement on timing, but eventually) the idea of requiring a plugin to play video from your site/source is going to have to go away.    Take video away from Flash, and Flash is still an awesome product – it just needs to be repositioned/reframed to developers.

For Apple, the very real threat of HTML5 is probably going to be a much bigger nightmare for them than the thought of Flash apps running on their devices ever would have been.    Now is the time to start considering opening up the iPhone SDK and removing some of the silly limitations that sandbox apps in and prevent them from doing things like running in the background, so as to offer a compelling reason to developers to want to develop natively for the device.     Eventually, they'll have no choice but to do this if they want to keep that App Store gravy train running.

Ok Adobe friends, tear me apart.    Cheers.

Ok – so fair warning – rant mode.

Since joining the world of higher education in February of 2008, I must have heard someone, somewhere talk about Second Life as the “next big thing” at least 30 or 40 times.

Guess what – it’s not. Second Life has been the next big thing since it launched in 2003. Next big things don’t have to talk about why their moment is just around the corner. Next big things are too busy having their moment.

Don’t get me wrong – if your thing is creating an avatar, digitizing your surroundings, and figuring out how to drive around in a golf-cart and run in to other people you meet there, more power to you. However, if you’re intention is that you’re going to try to make Second Life part of your business plan, I can save you the time and link you to FailBlog right now.

Why? Well, number one, the usage in Second Life is way overestimated. The number you hear thrown out is “10 million users”. Second Life has “10 million users” the same way Vanilla Ice sold 11 million copies of To the Extreme.

Registrations does not, in any way, represent active usage. Even by the most generous estimates, there are only about 1.2 to 1.5 million active second life users. Worldwide. In 5 years. To put that in perspective, when the iPhone App Store opened up, Apple reported about 60 million applications downloaded in one month, and some of those you had to pay for. Why? Because it was the next big thing – it wasn’t just talking about how it was the next big thing.

But hey, don’t take my word for it – here are some nuggets from around the web. Ken Wheaton, of Advertising Age was told when he dismissed Second Life as an also-ran that he “just didn’t get it”. His response: “There’s a big difference between not getting it and simply thinking something is a waste of time and money.” Bravo, Mr. Wheaton.

PC World cited Second Life as one of its Top 10 biggest web annoyances in 2007, complaining about the clunky interface, steep learning curve for new users, and general lack of anything interesting to do once you get the controls and interface figured out.

Google, which bought in to the hype a bit and jumped on the virtual world bandwagon this summer with Lively just shut the site down after internal examination during a belt-tightening period determined that the demand just wasn’t there. This is Google – the company who keeps “Beer Googles” in as a feature of Gmail – I love them, but they’re not the most discriminating organization when it comes to letting a product hang around and catch on.

That’s not to say that the concept of virtual worlds isn’t an interesting, potentially compelling one – but it is my belief that Second Life as a specific virtual world has missed its window. Just like Friendster during the infancy of the Social Networking boom, it may be a site that just got in a little too early.

The reality is that people just aren’t as interested in Second Life as the hypers seem to believe. One way to determine the popularity of something on the web is to look at the chatter that something demonstrates – across blogs, article mentions, etc. Let’s let a simple picture tell a story.

Don’t tell me – show me. And until you do, if you’re going to spend money on Second Life, send it to me. I have some nice virtual swampland in Florida that I’ll sell you real cheap. I’ll even pay your closing costs for you in “CummingsBucks”.

Taking Feedback and Running With It

This reminds me of some project I’ve been involved with recently. I don’t remember exactly what……..but definitely something……..