No Adobe Flash: A True, Sad Tale of What It Might Be Like to Own iPad
Last week, I did a post about how the Apple iPad's lack of Adobe's Flash might be its Achilles Heel, a vulnerability that in the short-term could kill its market potential because it so vastly limits its multimedia friendliness. As (bad) luck would have it, I realized this morning that I just happen to have been experiencing the Flash-less Web for the past week, courtesy of having to work on a loaned computer on which I'm prohibited from loading new software while my suped-up laptop is in the shop. To use a hackneyed word, my online experience right now SUCKS.
At the risk of exposing my weakness for low-brow pop culture, here are the video clips I missed this morning:
- Exclusive video on AOL of Dr. Oz giving a lecture to Carnie Wilson about her weight.
- Gawker's videos of Jon Stewart's appearance on Bill O'Reilly last night.
- Video on CNN of soldiers discussing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" debate.
Apple's position on this is that Flash is buggy (and that the world is moving toward the video-friendly HTML5 anyway). Flash is buggy. But Apple's concern about that only pretends to be about the needs of consumers (and advertisers). Consumers are willing to put up with a little bugginess in order to get the content they want on the zippy new multimedia device they've just bought. You're asking them to pay at least $400, for chrissake! It's a lesson for anyone who sells stuff: listen to your market, and realize when you've succumbed to internal biases about other companies it might be in your best interest to cooperate with.
A counterargument here is that the lack of Flash hasn't hurt iPhone sales, but the iPhone and the iPad are two very different devices. The iPhone fills a documented consumer need -- of having a cell phone -- and it does many, many other nifty things besides. The iPad is asking people to essentially introduce a new device into their lives, and so the baseline expectation in that scenario is that it be at least as good as similar devices, and probably better.
As an aside, I read with interest this morning that Apple has hired two mobile advertising executives for Europe. This comes after the recent hire of former Quattro Wireless exec Andy Miller to head mobile advertising for the company, reporting directly to Steve Jobs. Being in the ad production and sales business is a new venture for Apple. While the focus seems to be on building ads specifically for Apple devices, it will be fascinating to see what influence, if any, the advertisers that Apple will now work more closely with will have on the Flash debate. As I, and others, have said before, advertisers and agencies are a beleaguered lot; the path of least resistance, which they need to follow right now, is to executive online ads using Flash. To ask them to create new executions on platforms that are still fairly limited in scope, is asking too much.
Previous coverage of the Apple iPad at BNET Media: