Apple is turning the screws tighter on Adobe to kill Flash — with their latest update to the iPhone OS they’ve now gone as far as to put in their agreement with developers that they can’t use Flash. This got me thinking about the history of Apple: As old time fanboys remember when Steve Jobs returned to the company it wasn’t a happy time. We were all glad to have him back, but upon arrival he killed the Newton and put HyperCard out to pasture. In fact one of the reasons I first dismissed the iPod was that as an old Apple fanboy it was never going to be as cool as the Newton. Little did I know that it would evolve into the iPhone.

And in many ways people forget that with HyperCard Apple really pioneered the idea that non-programmers could program. Sadly Microsoft introduced Visual Basic which ruled the desktop — and then later Flash did the same thing for the web. When I first told a friend of mine who’s a programmer that Apple was blocking Flash his first reaction was that the idea of not having a fourth-generation programming language for a platform was crazy. So there seems to be a real gap which to me is a sign that Apple might be working on that gap.

Add to that the fact that a Flash killer isn’t a new idea: Silverlight is a living example from Microsoft. And while Silverlight hasn’t killed Flash, my guess is that it will keep it off of an future Microsoft mobile platform. In fact you can take this a step further when you look at the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Photoshop is now twenty years old, but we should assume that it will last forever. Apple has shown that they’re willing to go head-to-head with Microsoft in terms of going after MS Office with their iWork suite — so why shouldn’t they go after Adobe’s Creative Suite? In the video world they’ve already done this with Final Cut Pro killing Avid, so how hard can it be to come up with a replacement for Flash, Dreamweaver and Photoshop?

While I haven’t played with it yet the screenshots I’m seeing of the Windows Phone 7 look great. I’m an Apple fanboy at heart but it’s a wonderful surprise to see that Microsoft didn’t just do an iPhone clone. This isn’t enough to make me switch from my iPhone, however it is enough to make me have second thoughts about switching to Android and it also convinces me now more than ever that Palm won’t live to see the end of the year. From what I’ve read the Windows team has been working on this for 18 months and they decided to focus on the app side of the phone which is their core strength:

Look at that: Office looks sexy! Office hasn’t looked sexy to me since I first encountered it on the Mac eons ago as an alternative to what was out there in the DOS world. A common complaint about Microsoft is that you can get some great products like the Xbox but you can also get some clunkers too. Here it looks like Microsoft put the Xbox team to work, and this screen hints that they understand that games are important on mobile (something they have been sky about in the past):

Now I’ll grant you that this is just the demo, and I’ve seen a few ugly interface screens. However if the actual phone is anything close to this video it’s going to be worth checking out:

This next screen shot which shows the HTC HD2 (available in the US in “early 2010″) looks a bit too Apple like to me, however that said it looks much better than any Android interface that I’ve seen:

And lastly it’s just a superficial thing but even the idea of Microsoft hiring Isaac Mizrahi to design an opening screen if brilliant. Suddenly you have Microsoft becoming “cool” while Google looks geeky (and in bad way):

My only gripe as a designer is that once again Flash is locked out of another mobile platform. What makes me depressed about this is that Flash use to work on Windows Mobile, so it’s clearly not an oversight that Microsoft is out to screw Adobe. Like Apple with video it seems that Microsoft wants to push Silverlight which bodes ill for those of us who are good at Flash. My understanding is that Adobe is working on having AIR on every platform but the iPhone, but that misses the point of using Flash in the first place: The idea of write once, run anywhere.

Update: According to Gabriel Tellez the interface for Windows Phone 7 is based upon the Zune.

So I started to think: What would it take to get Flash on the iPad? Seeing that it’s a political situation the clear answer is that the CEO of Adobe needs to make nice with Steve. And then it hit me: Who the hell is the CEO of Adobe? Back in the day THE guy at Adobe was Warnock but that was eons ago — so who is running Adobe today? And much to my shock after doing a Google search I came across the page below and it tells you everything that’s wrong with this picture: There is no strong CEO at Adobe — the company is still in the shadow of Warnock.

In 1982 Dr. John E. Warnock co-founded Adobe with Dr. Charles Geschke and made it big with PostScript which powered the desktop publishing revolution which helped Apple a great deal. The problem was that it helped Apple after Steve Jobs had left the company. Now my guess is that Jobs had a decent relationship with Adobe because NeXT used a PostScript display mechanism and Adobe Illustrator was one of the first apps on the platform (which is now the heart of OS X).

Shown above is the NeXT cube which used a PostScript display from Adobe, this cost Jobs quite a bit and may be one of the reasons he likes to own his own core technologies. Below is a photo of Steve Jobs and John Warnock in the 80s.

Getting back to organizational chart you can see that Warnock is still involved in the company so Shantanu Narayen who is CEO is in the unenviable position of running the company but he still has the two co-founders looking over his shoulders (with all of their history). The result is that not only doesn’t Narayen have a free hand to play with Apple, but he also has the pride of Warnock which becomes a key factor. So why doesn’t Warnock make a move? Well I came across this interview with him, and it looks like he’s vexed about even calling up Steve Jobs:

Knowledge@Wharton: Another company that you have interacted with a long time is Apple. That relationship seems to have ebbed and flowed over the years. They were originally a very close partner — one of your first OEMs [original equipment manufacturers].

He has never been great at hitting that middle ground [between] openness and proprietary [products]. He has always seemed to lean to the proprietary side, to want to own everything. I think this is one case where he probably would do better if he didn’t do that.

So essentially you have Warnock throwing in the towel before he’s even made a phone call. The other problem is that Adobe is Warnock’s baby so he’d never even think of trying to sell the company to Apple in a million years — although that might save Flash. Of course to be fair to Warnock in the past Apple hasn’t acquired large companies.

In a way Adobe reminds me a great deal of Yahoo! and Sun — it’s a company from a previous era where it was the star but it hasn’t aged well. In the same way that Microsoft Office is under a disruptive threat from Google Docs you can see that all the key Adobe products could be next in line to be killed by the cloud and other disruptive forces that are changing the tech landscape.

Is this the immediate end of Flash? No. However it’s the begging of the end as other parties like Google and Microsoft have no interest in supporting Flash.

Followup: From recent leaks it seems that Jobs doesn’t think much of Adobe according to this article:

“About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.”

During the CD-ROM era of the 90s the only real game in town was Macromind Director. The program first started life out as an animation program bit with the boom in multimedia Director gained a programming language called Lingo and had a loyal following. Then the damn web came along and ruined it all: There was a web version of Director called Shockwave, but due to the overhead of bitmap graphics another program called Flash started to build rapid momentum. Macromedia would acquire Flash and rumor has it that Director is still around but the notion of getting a Lingo gig is history. And now that it’s the year 2010 I’m seeing the same thing slowly start to happen to Flash all over again.

Above: Future Splash Animator from 1996, the program that would become Flash.

Keep in mind that as someone who focuses on online games I love Flash, but when Apple introduced the iPhone I found myself of the outside for the first time in years. Mobile devices are the frontier for new media (as we use to call it) and if you’re a Flash developer the problem is that Apple, Google, Microsoft and even Palm have no vested interest in helping Adobe.

The truth is that this isn’t a technical issue but a political one, and as a Flash shop my only hope is that Apple, Google or Microsoft buys out Adobe. However I don’t see that in the cards: Apple views Flash as a delivery mechanism for video and they have QuickTime. Google has no strategic interest in buying Adobe when they can support open standards. And of course Microsoft has Silverlight which was always billed as a Flash killer.

My problem is that I’m using Flash to develop online games for kids, however that’s a small niche market in the bigger picture. My guess would be that the biggest use for Flash is video (YouTube being the most high profile example), however with HTML 5 coming there may not be a need for a video plugin. Another use for Flash has always been to create multimedia interfaces for websites, however AJAX has started to really to really chip away at that market. Yes a microsite for a Hollywood film might still use Flash but my guess is that 80% of animated slideshows that you see out there are powered by AJAX scripts.

Above: HyperCard was still around in 1996 but it was out of the limelight.

I don’t think Flash is going to die right away, but I do fear that it’s going to fade with time. I first watched this HyperCard in the 90s: This easy to use tool for non-programmers introduced a generation to interactive media, but being stuck on the Mac and limited to black-and-white Director and Visual Basic took its place. All these years later there are still folks begging Steve Jobs to bring HyperCard back, but it will only gather dust in the Apple museum next to the Newton and a Pippin.