TwitterInteresting report on The Verge today about Adobe’s proposed roadmap for the Flash Player runtime:
Future bug fixes and developments will be prioritized around two key areas: gaming and the deployment of so-called premium video. Relying on its nearly universal distribution, Adobe hopes to see Flash maintain its position as a leader in browser-based games (something that Google is actively challenging with its Chrome Native Client development kit), and will seek to support its developers with a formalized game dev program and a set of unspecified game services.
I can’t quite see how this is going to play out well for Adobe in long-term, considering that so much browser gaming is likely to be played on mobile/tablet devices — which is the one space where Flash can’t reach.
On the video side of things, Adobe pledges closer collaboration with hardware partners and the delivery of its content streaming and content protection technology to more platforms in native formats.
In short, this means Adobe are forging closer links with Intel and online streaming services like Netflix, Lovefilm etc. Problem with that is that Intel are at serious risk of losing massive market share to ARM-like technologies and the TV ecosystem (whatever that’s going to look like in the next few years), and again: ARM and TV are the two places where Flash doesn’t fit well.
Nobody knows if Flash will even be supported on Windows 8 — if that doesn’t happen, then surely Flash will be pretty much dead in the water.