Flash and Netflix on Motley Fool
This is classic, and it’s indicative of a wider trend as more and more attention gets paid to RIAs. People who don’t really have any sense of the history of our business or the technologies start writing about buzzwords. In this case the Motley Fool wrote a blog post about how Adobe is running scared because of Silverlight. The premise was that Netflix had switched from Flash to Silverlight and that Flash was in trouble. The problem is that Netflix never used Flash. In fact I doubt it ever will seeing as the Founder of Netflix is on Microsoft’s board.
So how do we fix this? How can we better educate journalists on the competitive landscape. I think everyone at Adobe has a pretty healthy respect for Silverlight, and that’s been great for our customers. We’ve added a lot of features to the Flash Player and have done a ton around innovation because everyone is gunning for us. I don’t think we’re “running scared”, we just know that we have to keep up the pace, and I think we have so far. The fact of the matter is that we’ve seen a ton of wins. Hulu, YouTube, CBS, and people switching back to Flash from Silverlight like MLB.com. Flash provides a great video experience. Our server software has made giant strides both in price and features like dynamic streaming and DRM. Competition is healthy but I’d be hard-pressed to name an area where we’re behind when it comes to rich media or RIAs on the web. But if you, as the customer, think there are, let us know. We’re listening.
December 10th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Judging from the comments, and the editors apology, he got his backside handed to him
David
December 11th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Hi,
As a Silverlight guy I have to be the first to say that I too have the highest respect for Flash. I started trying to learn it several years ago BUT it just wasnt for me. Since then I have picked up the .Net skill and it was just logical for me to move into Silverlight.
Flash/Flex/Aor are amazing technologies and I want to personally say to you adobe guys KEEP UP DOING WHAT YOUR DOING. Flash 10 has killer features and you guys keep upping the ante, thanks to you guys we have this RIA industry and thanks to your continual vision Silverlight continues to grow quickly. Alot of people don’t realize this BUT there is alot of room for both of us, actually room for all of us (including JavaFx and possibly google, with there native stuff)..
Anyway of my rant… looking forward to what you have planed in Flash 11….
December 15th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Aside from video… I have a really hard time seeing thousands of graphic shops around the world switching over to PCs to allow them to create Silverlight experiences. I develop exclusively on a mac (mostly because I prefer Unix) but there is simply nothing compelling for me to switch over to Silverlight.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:26 am
I read the blog and comments on Motley yesterday…
One comment was:
“Guess motley fool must have had editorial lay offs.” …lol
January 5th, 2009 at 11:10 am
SmoothHD (IIS/Silverlight) is going to be a huge win for Silverlight. FMS adaptive bit rate is looking great, but the overhead involved with deploying and or managing FMS servers (utilizing CDN’s or not) is troublesome. We need to be able to HTTP delivere HD video with the adaptive bit rate features in the flash player. Cheers!