Sunday, May 2, 2010

Flash In The Pan

The escalating Apple vs Adobe exchange on Flash (vs migration to open standards like HTML5) and the adequacy of open-standards alternatives has another data point:
[I]n the past four quarters, the H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent, and is now the largest format by far. Meanwhile, Flash [encodings] represent only 26 percent of all videos. That is down from a combined [Flash encoding] total of 69 percent four quarters ago. So the native Flash codecs and H.264 have completely flipped in terms of market share
Erick Schonfield of TechCrunch, quoted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt in "Apple vs. Adobe: Is Flash Dying?"
Given what Apple has demonstrated is possible using open standards and modern browsers, the need for proprietary plug-ins to deliver content or interfaces to customers or other users seems solidly on the decline.

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