How about this: Am I less of a person because I work in Flash?

I haven’t really (well, sortof) weighted in on the Flash vs. HTML5 debate yet, mostly because the main posters pro and con are both more technically qualified, have a stronger social following, and/or have more backing from marketers. It is the futility of the debate itself that interests me, both from a very personal perspective and from the perspective of an internet veteran.

The nature of the debate that I observe from the comfort of my Laptop is the following:

• Camp A: Here’s a bunch of reasons why Flash sucks!
• Camp B: Nuh-uh! Here’s a list of reasons why that’s not the case!

As you probably realize yourself, this argument structure is essentially religious, and can be replayed whenever two people have different opinions and are not willing to reconcile. It’s certainly not restricted to the technology space (Choice vs. Life anyone?), and the futility of entering into such an argument is well known to anyone who’s ever been involved in a flame war.

Now take this Adobe/Apple debate and pose it to our society (full of technology-advocates, evangelists and gurus), and you’ll soon come to realize that Adobe cannot win this argument, not given its current strategy. This is for two reasons:

1. You cannot win a flamewar from a defensive position.
2. You cannot win a flamewar with reason.

Adobe’s Flash Team are doing an admirable job at defending against everything that’s coming out of Apple, the Javascript community, and the standards purists. Unfortunately by the time they get to debunking these statements the damage has been done, and no matter how quickly they respond they will never get the same media penetration that Apple will. Why? Because people don’t like to be told they’re wrong, and anyone who listens to a flamewar long enough will start to tune out. Just ask Fox News- they make a living on this – and there’s no way you can reach an unreceptive audience no matter how good your arguments are.

Secondly, any aggressor can very easily cherry-pick its arguments to attack the defender on weak points, and thus invalidate their entire argument simply because one point wasn’t well researched. While the overall flash platform is a strong contender on the web, you’ll notice that the argument is focused on a few key shortcomings – performance, accessibility, ‘open-ness’ and the like – in which HTML5 has strength. By defending specifically against these weak points, Adobe is then empowering critics to further choose sub-points where they have strength, and through this cycle the argument is diminished and diminished until at the end all we remember is that Adobe was trying to defend itself and their critics never ran out of anything to point to and say: “Hey you suck”.

Lastly, as I have seen in several cases, arguments have started go get personal, and as soon as you enter that arena you can invalidate someone’s argument simply by pointing out their own shortcomings. To use myself as an example, you can invalidate anything I have to say about Flash and HTML5 by pointing out that I’m not a real CS major, that I haven’t remained at a job for more than 4 years, or that I go so far as to claim that there are people more qualified to talk about this than I in the very first paragraph in this post. My experience and job title doesn’t matter – as soon as you say “Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re not a CS Major” you’ve got me completely discredited.

But what bothers me the most is the first concession which the Adobe Community had to make, and that is that their pool of developers draws from the design community and are subsequently not the best. Now, every technology has a wide range of developer competence, yet with Flash it’s becoming a banner cry: “Flash Developers suck”. Your technology choice does not define how skilled you are, and yet it’s becoming pretty clear that those of us who choose Actionscript and Flash are seen as incompetent, less than human, and not worth listening to because we’re blind and ignorant fanboys who don’t understand what they’re missing with [Insert Language Here].

This last point is perhaps the most damaging, because it’s eroding Adobe’s hard-won community. Do you like feeling like a shitty developer? Do you want to be the pariah of the web? Do you like being told that you are the scum of the earth? No, and I don’t either, and if like myself you’re simply trying to make a living, chances are you’re seriously considering learning something else to make sure you remain employable.

So the real question is: Will rational minds prevail? I doubt it.

So lets talk about the consumer for a bit, in particular the consumer described in The Long Tail. Here is an individual who knows his/her own lifestyle and needs, who like particular applications over others, whose preferred experience with one service might be different from his/her neighbor’s experience for the same. This is an individual who, when presented with a Smart Phone, wants to have features and applications behaving a particular way, and will only put up with the provided options of the telco because there’s no other choice. In short, they have a craving for personalization, and will gladly move to any platform that has applications that meet their needs.

Deploying a mobile application to meet these needs is, in its simplest form, the following: First, you must have a developer able to access your SDK, platform and testbed with minimal fuss. Then, that developer must be able to deploy his application to a location where a potential user may download it onto their device. Lastly, the device must be able to run said application. These three tenets of Develop, Deploy, Consume can be easily seen on the regular web. Developers have their SDK’s, Deployment happens on a web server, and browsers allow consumption of the offered services.

In the mobile world this isn’t quite as simple. Yes, there are many websites now that have mobile components, yet lets face it: The form factor and memory constraints of mobile computing devices make it so that few applications can offer full functionality and experience while constrained by regular browser controls. Additionally, we are back to (for the time being) the computing world of the early 90′s, where applications are restricted by processing and memory constraints. Back then, however, we could load applications from Floppy disks, something that’s not so easy on a mobile device. The development platforms exist, but deployment (as noted above) is extremely difficult, and the broad diversity of devices makes your target installable base problematic at best.

So let us take a look at the various players in the mobile market right now. First of all, let us look at the telecommunication companies, those that have the aforementioned problem with getting something On Deck. From their perspective, they have control over their delivery platform, and getting something from their platform to a mobile device is simple enough, however their process is such that they have completely lost their developer base. There are too many devices, too many different platforms and form factors, and deploying an application is simply too difficult for any developer to bother building something. Imagine the computing world in the mid-80′s, and you’ll understand what I mean.

Next let’s take a look at Microsoft, which in our case will also double as any company that has a mobile application which they want to deploy. Microsoft has historically been brilliant in its developer support tools, so much so that it’s stupidly easy to develop an application for their operating system. Similarly, the fact that they are in the software and not the hardware business lets them sell a platform rather than a device, which allows mobile manufacturers to create devices that can run any application built for it. The place where they have failed, however, is in securing and simplifying the delivery platform, which remains under the control of the telco’s.

Third, let us look at Google and Android. Here, the development platform is easy to access and has some brilliant development tools. And… then what? Well, frankly, we don’t know a whole lot about how Android will be delivered, because while many manufacturers and providers have jumped on the bandwagon, we as of yet have no idea whether Android will use an open application deployment platform, or even whether phones built by their manufacturing partners will come with Android pre-installed. The suggested promise of Android is Build Once, Deploy To Any Phone, but if it means that a developer still has to get something On Deck with a Telco, you will once again be in the same boat as Microsoft- a common platform, but no control over application distribution.

I should note here that I doubt Google will not have some central application service, it simply hasn’t been announced yet.

Lastly, let us come to Apple. In this case I have to make a special note, in that while I recognize the SDK is publicly available, it is unfortunately not available for Windows (No, Aptana junkies, that’s just a web browser). Thus while they have alienated a good percentage of computer users overall, the additional cost of an OSX development platform is comparatively minor, and won’t detract a company interested in building an iPhone application. Taking that into consideration, they have everything buttoned up. Developers can access the SDK, they have an established and largely ubiquitous deployment platform not tied to the telco, and they have a device that will run any software built. This end-to-end solution is exactly the same thing that made the iPod so successful, because it got a user from Purchase to Play in one smooth experience.

And no, I don’t own an iPhone.

As a result I was practically giddy when I recognized a real world example of Judo Economics, a situation where a player uses the strength of their opponent against them. Consider a simple case: There exist two markets for a single product and two companies that can produce said product. The first market is large, however serving it comes with a high cost and therefore a low margin. The second market is small, but serving it is cheap and therefore comes with a high margin. The first of the companies must serve both markets, has deep pockets, while the second is considering market entry, but can only serve one of the two. Each company can only set one price against both markets. The question posed is: What will happen?

The answer is as follows: The entrant will enter the smaller, more profitable market and undercut the larger company to the point where the larger company would suffer a net loss by matching their price. Why? Well, without drawing the decision tree it turns out that net profit for the system will be larger for the big company because the entrant can continue to undercut it until the margin in the smaller market disappears entirely. Quite simply, they cannot match the entrant because they are forced to serve the both markets. Ergo: Their strength is used against them.

The Real World

Now lets take this example to the real world: Microsoft is currently serving the vast majority of the desktop market. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine a desktop computer that doesn’t run Windows, and even in the laptop market they command a substantial segment. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to solidify their position within that market, releasing their own languages, developer toolkits, IDE’s and whatnot. Buy Microsoft, by Microsoft, for Microsoft, anything you want to do on a computer you can do with Microsoft.

Unfortunately, by winning the war for the desktop market they’ve now locked themselves into serving it, and as any marketer knows you can’t really segment a market that size perfectly, at least not without severely diluting your brand. At most we’ve seen three versions of Windows, usually targeted at the Office User, the Power User, and the Home User. From both a product management perspective and from a branding perspective they’re pushing the limit of how many versions of windows they can support, especially if you take into account all the legacy versions still in circulation.

The number of versions actually doesn’t really matter- what matters is that Microsoft has to charge a price that the majority of said segment is willing to pay while at the same time accommodating for the development cost of meeting the needs of the entire market. Some consumers might be willing to pay more than they’re charging, others less, and the end result is that the margins average out to something marginally profitable.

The Competition

This is where the case for Judo Economics begins to take shape. Microsoft in the late 90′s and early 00′s could serve the entire market and did so, winning a dominant position. Since then the competition has identified users’ specialized needs and focused on them, effectively fragmenting the formerly homogenous user base of computer users into smaller segments: gamers, office workers, mobile computing, social networking, online productivity and so forth. They’ve each chosen their target market segment, have specialized their product offering for that particular segment, and are reaping the benefits of customers who are willing to pay more for a more specialized offering.

In the meantime, Mr. Gates still has to serve everyone else. The long and short is all the geeks who were angry about Microsoft’s antitrust practices vis-a-vis netscape and IE/browser integration/exclusion should have been cheering them on. A monolithic operating system and environment cannot be truly customized to the individual anymore, and they incur the massive cost of having to develop not only all the functionality they’ve supported up until now, but any new features that are identified in the market. In the world of the Long Tail their ability to meet all of a users general needs rather than all of a users’ specialized needs puts them at a significant disadvantage which their competition is busily exploiting.

So who are the competition?

Adobe: You might not think of Adobe as much of a competitor to Microsoft, however the recent introduction of Silverlight shows this is an area that Microsoft has identified as profitable (they’re good at identifying opportunity, I’ll give them that). Unfortunately Adobe has a lock on the real driving force behind the online experience: Designers. As long as they continue to focus on supporting them, the decisions of what technology to use will remain firmly in their court. Yes, purely technically designed websites and RIA’s will likely fall to Microsoft, but quite frankly I don’t think Adobe cares about serving the online accountant.

Apple: In 1999, the book on this fight seemed to have been written. Apple soundly lost the battle for the desktop, and was classified even lower than Linux, a computing platform for rabid advocates that would eventually follow the Amiga into obscurity. And now where are they? Apple is sexy. Apple is hip. Apple is targeted at a consumer segment that is affluent and to some extent image conscious, taking those users away from Microsoft. All those fat margins that could have been earned by Bill are now wandering off to the upmarket offerings provided by Apple, who doesn’t ever want to be in the position of having to serve everyone… or do they? (more on this in another post).

Nintendo: The XBox 360 is everywhere, Halo was a huge deal. We know that Microsoft was succesful here, and will continue to be so for the forseeable future. Yet this market shows some of the same signs as Apple’s position in the Desktop and Laptop market, because the XBox has become a commodity- everybody has one. Everyone does not have a Wii, and the speed at which they fly off the shelves shows a level of demand much like that of the iPod. The Wii is cool, while the XBox has become the console equivalent of a beige box. How this will play out in the long run is hard to say at this time, however given Redmond’s recent strategic moves into community gaming I feel they won’t give up their share so readily.

Google: It’s hard not to mention Google here, and even though I think they’ve jumped the shark and will lose their innovative edge in the very near future, their dominance in the search market is too big to ignore (just look at the Yahoo hostile takeover- Microsoft’s not ignoring them). Here we once again have a company that has to do everything: browser, search, ads, etc, competing with a company that’s just really, really good at one or two of those. Guess which one is dominant? I thought so.

So that’s the argument in a nutshell: Microsoft has to serve the entire market, and as a result is too crippled to actually compete for the plumb market shares. Looking forward we can already see them becoming more aware of their situation though: The next version of windows is supposedly modular and thus more customizable to individuals’ needs. They are attempting to acquire Yahoo, and opening up the XBox for community developers is a dangerously O.P.E.N. tactic. I’m calling the score tied, lets see what happens in round three.