We knew it was coming and now it is here. Adobe Flash is going away… Amazing!
Lance Ulanoff writes yesterday on Mashable that “Adobe confirmed what reports were saying all morning: It’s done with the Flash Mobile Player and has now thrown its lot in with the HTML5 crowd — for mobile at least.”
What I find amazing about this is that I am old enough (57) to have lived through the entire birth, life and death of a very powerful and ubiquitous technology. When Adobe purchased Macromedia in 2005 and got Flash technology with the deal, I thought it would be around forever!
When I start thinking about it, this technology birth, life and death phenomenon is happening more and more in my life.
Example 1: My wife and I are watching “The West Wing” TV series on DVD, having never watched them when the series was popular in the 90′s. I noticed the other night that C.J. put an Iomega Zip Disk into an external Zip Drive to retrieve some hot political inside information. I’ve got boxes full of those disks, and no drive or computer that will read them anymore! I’ve already thrown away all of my floppy disks from the Mac OS versions 1-9 days. Where is Iomega now? Who owns a floppy drive?
Example 2: I remember when Adobe “Shockwave” was THE future for interactive multimedia! Only to be replaced by that newer technology called “Flash” that Adobe got when it bought Macromedia, who bought it from some guy named Jonathan Gay, who says he got the original idea from playing with Lego’s!
Example 3: Remember MySpace? ‘Nuf said.
Change — rapid change — is just the world we live in. For better or worse, there is no stopping it.
This leads me to reflect on people I know who don’t like change and work very hard to resist it — especially in my age bracket and older. They tend to say things like, “it was different when I was a kid,” or that they prefer the older technologies over the newer ones because they are “better.” Why is that? Are they really?
It seems to me that when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press (moveable type), he not only opened the door to the masses being able to read the Bible on their own and in their own language without someone else telling them what it said and meant — thus setting the stage for the Protestant Reformation — he also opened the door to mass character smear campaigns, the rampant spread of published lies and propaganda, and the eventual entry of written and graphic pornography — to name just a few consequences.
The same thing can be said of every other communication technology advancement since then: the camera, motion pictures, telegraph, phonograph, telephone, radio, television, the Internet, mobile phones, Google’s search engine and Facebook.
I guess I am not like many in my generation. I prefer to embrace the reality of change, and the increasing rate of it, rather than to pretend it doesn’t exist or that it is all bad. I prefer to make the best of it and be a small force for employing it for good.
Good bye, Flash. Hello, HTML5.
