The Guardian has an interesting article with Mark Anders that covers a lot of ground and covers quite a bit about the Flash ecosystem from the Flash Player, to Flex, to Apollo. They hit on some of the major customers using Flash, how ubiquity really made Flash a big game in town and what is in store for the future of the platform.

 It’s a rosy picture, and rightly so. Flash has exploded. It’s gone from the dark days of “skip intro” and annoying advertisements to become a broad platform for delivering media, applications and new, rich, web experiences. All in a tiny download that Adobe can update almost at will and have a new version on 80% of machines within a matter of months. The Macromedia-Adobe merger ensured that the design tools for this new platform would be top notch, and they seem to be.

 But the century is only 7 years old, long in tech time, but short in publishing time. Things like ABC moving away from Flash Video lead me to believe that this is still a very new game. All you have to do is look at how much traction Ajax has to see that we still have quite a bit of evolution to go in the Rich Internet Application space. Apollo, something that changes all the rules, is still a pre-1.0 product. I’m a card-carrying member of the Mark Anders fan club, but saying that Flash is the new publishing tool of the century is a bit much. Flash may be Gutenberg’s printing press, providing a huge jolt and showing everyone how revolutionary things can be, but there’s still a lot of innovation to be had in our little section of the web.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Flash, Publishing, Mark Anders[/tags]