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Craig discusses The End of Flash and what caused its demise.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

[00:00:00] We're going to talk about killing Flash. Did Steve jobs start the death of Adobe Flash Macromedia? Remember all those guys?

Hey, you're listening to Craig Peterson and watching me too. I am getting. Good at trying to post stuff on my website and YouTube videos stuff that is, and I've been updating all of my studio here and it may look kind of the same behind me here on the camera, but believe me, there are a lot of differences.

We're fixing things, I'm producing more stuff. We are going to be having a great, great. year this year, as we get more and more information to you, just like in the last segment here, where we were talking about DNS and what it means to you and how frankly, this Microsoft bug could be the next big ransomware attack vehicle out there.

Absolutely amazing.

[00:01:00] Well Flash, of course, you all know Flash, right? I don't need to really show you Flash. It was designed five years ago. Give or take right now maybe a little bit. And the idea behind Flash was let's give the internet some movement. If you weren't around back then in the mid-nineties, the internet was mostly text-based.

There were all a whole lot of what we would call brochureware sites at the time. Back in the early nineties, I was, I tried to convince businesses they needed to be online and people just weren't listening to me. It's just not worth the investment. Right.

[00:02:00] Of course, now it's people are trying to figure it out. How can I do this? How can I get online? And many people's questions, revolved, run hugger. Make this. More pretty. And that's how Flash kind of started the story on it is absolutely fascinating. And I have it, my website@craigpeterson.com. It goes on for pages and pages, but how these two guys, they struggle.

They, I had some success in business. They sold the company eight years. They're trying to figure out what should we do? How should we do this? They kind of stumbled on a couple of things that just did not work at all. They went to a couple of big trade shows and sold absolutely none of their product, which was, has sketching product for some of these early.

PDA portable digital assistants that were out there is really kind of a cool product. They only ever sold two of them, by the way. So they tried some things. So if you are an entrepreneur and you are sitting there saying, OMG, it's not selling, I'm not doing the right thing. Everything's coming to an end.

[00:03:00] A friend of mine, Steve Pavlina sent out note just this week that I read that I really, really appreciated. He was talking about how we have to stand up for our principles and, and he was specifically talking about our principals, when it comes to our life and our life values, what do we want to do? How do we wanna do it? When do we want to do it? These two guys never gave up and they didn't know exactly what they wanted to do, but they didn't know they wanted to do something.

And they wanted to make sure that while they were doing it, they were enjoying it. Right. I guess that makes sense. Certainly seems to make sense to me, as well.

So that's exactly what they did. They, they went out and they tried a few different things. As I said, it took him about eight years. Then they came up with this thing that allowed animation.

[00:04:00] And if you remember around 96 is when some of this animation really started to hit we're using Flash or are websites where the entire site was coded up using Adobe Flash and Adobe Flash was really cool. It did some wonderful things, frankly. I was quite impressed with it at the time, and I decided I'm going to learn Flash and maybe fly.

She's going to be my future as well. It was, it was really cool. They got a review from a writer in a magazine and they don't remember the writer's name, but the writer got a preview copy of it and said, Hey, listen, why don't you add some port for buttons, which was easy for them to do so they quickly added support for play button, fast forward button, rewind buttons.

And then they started adding more programmatic stuff to it. And before you know, it. Flash took over the web. And that was kind of around 99, when a foot had graphics that were moving any sort of video, it was all Flash-based. In fact, a lot of the streaming video that was happening back then in the early two thousands was based on Flash, which is really kind of different when you think about it nowadays. Right.

[00:05:00] Things went well through the, the arts, if you will, the double ops here at the beginning of the century for them. And they kind of sold out and moved around and Adobe ended up owning it and integrating it with some of the tools that Adobe had, then came 2010. On April 29th, 2010, I've got that right in front of me here.

Steve jobs published an open letter. He called it Thoughts on Flash. This was probably the beginning of the end for Flash. Now Flash was already known at the time for some security problems because it was really an almost an operating system more than a programming language. It allowed them to access stuff on the computer, make some changes, move things around, read files.

[00:06:00] Does that start to ring bells for you? About how dangerous Flash just might be? Well, it was, and Steve jobs brought that up in his open letter. And he also said in that open letter, the number one reason max crash is Flash. So Steve jobs was complaining about reliability problems, about security problems and about performance problems.

We remember what else happened 2010? The iPhone happened. And Steve jobs is working on that. And he decided right then and there that frankly Flash falls short. And those are, those are actually Steve Jobs words, Flash falls short, and it was never included in any version of iOS. So it wasn't on the iPhone. It wasn't on the later introduced iPad. Absolutely nothing.

[00:07:00] Well, the industry response was kind of mixed because there are a lot of people who had decided yeah. You know, Flashes the way they had big investments in Flash and they couldn't see it going away. But in November, 2011, Adobe pivoted and adopted the new standard.

The one that Steve jobs was promoting than the rest of the internet was behind, it was called HTML five. HTML five allowed your browser to basically act like an operating system. It can actually run multiple programs simultaneously for you, and it could do all of the animation and more than Flash could do it.

Could display videos. HTML five is the answer we're still living with today. A decade later almost. And. When Adobe decided that we're not going to be targeting Flash players anymore, but all of our tools, which were originally developed for Flash by these guys. Those tools are now adapted to use and spit out if you will, HTML five.

[00:08:00] So did Steve jobs killed Flash? Well yeah, kinda, he started it. But I think Flash, Adobe killed it itself. Certainly in November, 2011, Adobe switching over to its HTML five was a very big deal. They didn't keep up on patches. They didn't keep up on the security problems, you know, and they kind of did, but it was, was the stepchild problem that you have, they just didn't care enough about it.

Which is I think a real problem, some great quotes in this article, again, up on Craig peterson.com about what they were doing. They were saying, Hey, listen, this is causing bloating as well. It's not working well on mobile devices because mobile devices don't have as much computeing as a desktop computer does, not even close and they have to use battery.

[00:09:00] And so you're doing something heavy, like interpreting Flash on a browser. That's running on Java. That's being interpreted. I know on a little snap dragon chip or whatever, it might be on an Android device. You're really slow and you're really hogging resources. So Flash is gone burry it it's dead. It is no longer supported in many browsers.

And by the end of 2020, it's going to be completely gone. Even from Google Chrome.

Wow. We are going through fast today. When we get back, we'll get into Google here and how they're getting sued again for tracking people, even though they said they're not. Yes, indeed.

Make sure you go online right now. Craig peterson.com/subscribe and we'll be right back.

Stick around.

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Welcome! What caused the Demise of Flash plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN