Will RIM Really Go At It Alone With Adobe Flash?
Now that Flash compatibility is a non-issue among mobile devices, Apple iPad competitors are going to have to sing a new song about why you need to choose them. It was a huge campaign, “Choose us because we support Flash and it’s so important to the Internet.”
If you are RIM, you will announce that you intend to keep developing and releasing your own implementation.
I am guessing this is RIM trying to sound like they are here to save the day and hoping it will be enough to make them appreciated and adopted by consumers. Now, I’m not so sure it’s wise. RIM has limited resources and their ship is (not so) slowly sinking. This is probably not the time to be taking a chance on third-party plug-ins and extras. I might eat those words though, if other companies are willing to pay RIM for their efforts and turn it into a new revenue stream (if that is even allowed by Adobe’s source code license terms).
I’m a little curious how much effort keeping up with Flash development without Adobe around to help. They’ve been doing this since the beginning and they know a thing or two that wouldn’t already be lessons learned by RIM.
Supporting Flash going forward seems like an investment in the past when soon we will be able to tell the vintage of something by whether it still uses the plug-in. With RIM trying desperately to prove they are relevant and progressive enough to be taken seriously in the current market it seems like a real step backward to hold on to this one.
With Flash hitting the back-burner, Adobe will be focusing their efforts on HTML 5 and their AIR platform which means Adobe is finally going to reach iOS-based devices.
[via allthingsd]