Adobe’s invisible platform

Posted by on 29 June 2007 14:14

Cringley wrote a post on his blog today about Adobe Flash and the possibility of its becoming the invisible, ubiquitous platform for the Internet.”The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” So wrote Mark Weiser in his 1991 paper “The Computer for the 21st Century”.

Cringley’s thesis is that Adobe PDF and Flash have become so ubiquitous that they are now invisible–essentially every computer used for web browsing has Acrobat Reader (or another PDF reader) and Flash Player. And with the Internet being driven more and more to mobile devices, Adobe has the potential to put Flash everywhere and make it the invisible standard for Internet applications. Adobe doesn’t even have to compete with Microsoft in that realm. (.NET has a long way to go before it can even compete with Flash, and Windows doesn’t even enter the picture.)

programming, Uncategorized, ,
  • Smalleek

    What do you mean by an”invisible platform”? Do you mean like it’s used so much and everyone has it that they don’t notice it anymore and it can just sneak in their web pages invisibly, or what? What does .NET web stuff even have to do with competing against flash? Their web pograms, or what? Microsoft released a thing called Silverlight for “Lighting Up the Web”, though I don’t know if it’ll be that successful, because everyone’s using flash, and it would just be another thing to install, and you know about Microsoft and installing web thingies. I argee that Adobe doesn’t even have to compete with MS. I really like your blog. Keep it up!!!

  • Steven

    Yes, that’s what I mean about the invisible platform. And I had overlooked Silverlight–but that is certainly the most direct competitor to Flash right now. I don’t think .NET will ever get in that realm anyway, but it is another cross-platform programming framework, just like Java and Flash (in that respect).