Thursday, May 12, 2005

Macromedia Flash vs. SVG: Adobe's future strategy in question

There was a big question at the World Handset Forum recently and that was about the future of Flash following the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe. So far, Adobe has not had a mobile strategy, and its support for SVG, an alternative, open standard clearly conflicts with its "new baby", Flash. It's difficult to imagine Adobe keeping both standards as they are so clearly redundant. So they could decide to stop their support of SVG, or could kill Flash and replace it with SVG.
  • if they stop supporting SVG, they leave the door open to somebody else endorsing it, which would become a real "open source" threat in this important area;
  • if they stop Flash, the cost regarding the installed based is huge. They would have to convert their authoring tool (which are their cream and butter) to the SVG format. But then what happens if/when open source authoring tools pop up everywhere?
Am I missing something? The information on the Adobe site seems quite vague (see the acquisition FAQ pdf) but industry participants are worried and this uncertainty hurts Flash. The kind of participants to this forum (mostly very big players) can usually ill afford such uncertainty.
To a certain extent (I'm speculating here, so you can stop reading), it might be that the acquisition is - in part - motivated by the recognition that Flash and SVG have a big overlap, so it's better to swallow the competition. If Adobe keeps SVG, it might mean that they see their future in the graphic world (primary purpose of SVG) rather than in the application development world (the trend with Flash).

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, I don't have any knowledge of how Adobe folks think of these issues, but for me, that question of "How do Flash and SVG relate on mobile?" is a straightforward one -- the one is a superset of the other.

On mobile devices it's the Flash Lite libraries and the SVG-Tiny spec which are relevant, rather than their larger desktop cousins. The Macromedia Flash Lite 1.1 libraries can be licensed with a fully-compliant SVG-Tiny renderer, as described here:
http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/devices/articles/msvg_t.html

It may not need to be "one or the other", because the XML curve-description language can already be rendered within Macromedia Flash work.

(I found your page through a Technorati search on "macromedia", and will keep this page open to check for followups as long as possible.)

Regards,
John Dowdell
Macromedia Support

May 13, 2005  
Blogger BB said...

Hi John,
Thanks a lot for your comment. I'd like this blog to be a place where we can have such discussion. I think you're right and I agree with you post.
I'm preparing a post on Flash and I hope you'll like it :-)

May 18, 2005  

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