The Elephant in the Room.

Use any of the popular  Web2.0 sites on the Internet today without Adobe Flash player previously installed in your browser and your going to have a severely restricted experience ( which is marketing speak for a rubbish time ).

There we  all are getting pleased with ourselves that the desktop wars of the last decade are becoming irrelevant and, thanks in part to the Internet  ,  we are moving away from a dependency the operating systems only to be building a another  dependency on another companies product.

Arguably Microsoft are becoming aware of this “trend” and their rather lack lustre attempts at enticing us to see the Silverlight seem  hard pressed to convince the skeptics, I guess now they now how the Open Source supporters feel.

Is this a bad thing ? Well not really , well not absolutely , well possibly , well actually im not sure !

Adobe Flash works well with Microsoft Windows products, it works okay with Apple Mac products and it works passably with Open Source platforms[1].

I wonder though what the future is for Flash Player ? For that matter what is the future of Adobe ?

Adobe has a product which is enables YouTube, Phreadz, Facebook Video, Revision3, Blog.tv, Ustream and many other sites.  Adobes’ process of updating and delivering newer more robust versions of the  Flash Player  has  hardly been theyre main priority , its certainly not its main income stream.  With so many sites valued at millions, upon millions of dollars dependent on this product at the browser ( and therefore user ) level I keep wondering when the other shoe will drop ?

In the past I have voiced opinions that Adobe should be bought by Google,  it might be bought by Apple and could be bought by Microsoft and I wish would be bought by Canonical.  Adobe have not  struck me as  having the ability to focus globally on the infrastructure to deliver and maintain the Flashplayer long term and should they, one day,  pull the rug from underneath us, then we better hope we have enough mixed metaphors to cope with this Elephant In the Room.

Thanks for reading.

Photo Credit: The Elephant In The Room : BitBoy

[1]Try getting webcams to work with Flash and you’ll see what I mean.