Will Adobe's HTML5 Strategy Help Developers?

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister sees Adobe's shift toward HTML5 as a boon for developers only if the company secures its place in the Web developer tools market — but initial signs suggest that this won't be the case. 'The opportunity for Adobe now lies in filling the gaps in today's IDEs, code editors, and graphics software with new tools that can help designers and developers more easily take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of HTML5,' McAllister writes. 'Unfortunately, however, it sounds like Adobe is going to drop the ball. In this week's meeting with financial analysts, the company said its emphasis is not on building great tools but on subscription pricing, Web-based content creation software, and — most important of all — growing its digital marketing, advertising, and analytics businesses. That's right: Adobe wants to be Google. It's too bad because Web developers could really use an Adobe right now.'"

This Article is stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML5 is the future.

Adobe wants to stay relevant.

Author of Article doesn't understand reality.

End of Story.

Re:Why should they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I didn't rtfa. My bad. Mod me down.

Congratulations! You will now be promoted to an editor position.

Re:Oops Adobe did it again

[tacroy]

One comment on this; and only because I see it repeated so often I assume most consider it fact. Flash does WAY more than video streaming, and html5 has not yet even come close to the robustness that flash offers. Smokescreen made it possible to convert the animation part to html, but not much of the actual programming.

People tend to view flash as "A web video player" when in reality its much closer to "java + good video playing"

Yes, most peoples view of flash is based on youtube and worthless animated website intro videos. But it's also used to create very robust web applications, eLearning, and games. HTML5 can do some of that, but there are still MANY uses for which flash and actionscript are far superior.

Re:Adoibe screwed up big time..

[Xest]

As the other guy pointed out to you, the problem is Adobe makes absolutely no money from the Flash plugin, and maintaining that on an ever increasing amount of platforms is getting prohibitively expensive for them.

Their money is made in selling tools, and if mobile plugin development is beginning to cost them more than the tools bring in there is little reason to continue the tools.

I'm not sure the downfall of Flash is too big a deal for Adobe, frankly I imagine they make much more money from Photoshop, Premier, Illustrator and Acrobat than they do selling the Flash development tools.

Note also of course that they haven't given up on Flash on the desktop, they've only given up on Flash on mobile devices.

Realistically they just seem to be cutting away the areas of Flash that are costing a lot to develop, and bringing nothing back in return, and it may be that Flash on the desktop suffers in an increasingly mobile world, but does it matter when the profits from the Flash developer IDE just aren't that great anyway and they have little other monetisation of it? Marketshare isn't too useful if you're not making a penny from each installed Flash plugin.

Great news for developers.

[LWATCDR]

Think of all the restaurant sites that where dumb enough to have flash heavy websites. For the small developer they will make a mint writing mobile friendly sites. It is kind of funny that the sites you may most want to look up on a Mobile device are often the worst sites to try and use on mobile.