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The new technologies in After Effects, Photoshop and Illustrator bring remarkable workflow improvements to any project but when taking those to market they are encumbered by predominantly Flash export options.

Adobe once was a great company. That was before you made already outdated technology the basis for everything you stand for.

One thing right away. You customers don’t like being lied to. Not a good road to be on. When Narayen said Flash’s poor performance on the Mac was Apple’s fault, not Adobe’s he was proven lies shortly after. Microsoft’s Silverlight has none of performance issues that are plaguing Flash almost since its inception. If Microsoft can do it, why not Adobe?

Kevin Lynch after the iPad premiere posted photoshopped images of an iPad with blue lego icons (indicates non-standard content) claiming that’s how sites would look on the iPad without Flash. Shortly after it got debunked when actual screenshots of some of his examples surfaced with Flash workarounds in place already and no lego icons.

You accuse hardware manufacturers of locking their customers out of the ‘full web’. You try to shame them into putting your application runtimes into their devices on top of their own environments. This bears resemblance of the business practices employed by certain Sicily originating family run operations.

Companies having to do everything twice isn’t a smart business idea. No search engine can or will try to reverse engineer an opaque Flash blob to figure out its navigational structure. As of this writing, even marginally succeeding with a Flash web site means paying almost double to what a normal site would cost. Simply because a real Web site has to be built as well, not because of Apple’s decision, but because Flash has no useable structure. Search engines can only see random strings of text and that’s with the assistive features turned on.

So let’s say a company doesn’t care about their content being found and indexed by search engines. Let’s say it’s just a short term site. There’s a market for these too. Now doing these in Flash means an exponential increase in adverting budgets. Social media marketing is largely based on direct and deep-link sharing. A practice that requires a real web site, as a Flash blob can’t be deep-linked as no real URL is present. Sure it can react to a modified hyperlink masked by a redirect but real deep links that are actually useable are not possible. That’s why people like myself get so much work doing ‘ghost sites’, modified Wordpress installations and redirect scripts that respond to search engines and deep link requests.

I was an active Flash designer / developer starting in art school from 2001 to well into 2005 before I realized the damage my work is doing to clients. This was when SEO practices started to really become legit. I realized two things back then. Search engines are important, it’s how people find you and find you again. And second I realized I can’t justify a client’s site to be at the mercy of a single software company’s plug-in. It really is a ridiculous idea come to think of it. A company never truly owns their site. There is always something extra needed in addition to a browser.

Now that we have useable engines built on open technologies that keep evolving as we use them. multi-sprite animations, 3D environments, sound and video manipulation are all possible now without locking the audience intro proprietary technologies.

And the argument with people having to get a new browser, really? Just tell me, where can you download an old browser? Older hardware going to third world countries likely doesn’t run Windows anyway, it likely runs some flavor of Linux where WebKit based browsers reign anyway.

Maybe if you focused more on evolution instead of hanging on to past investments your stock value might actually recover. Betting the house on Flash brought nothing but harm on Adobe’s value, it’s time to let old traits go, and maybe the people who came with it as well.

JavaScript engines are there since quite some time now to create parity with Flash’s features, often at a fraction of the CPU load necessary. In the case of the WebKit implementations by both Google and Apple we even get hardware accelerations for a lot of intensive operations.

Starting to develop a website in Flash today is the natural equivalent of starting an epic novel today in Sumerian. Sure some people will be able to read it. Almost no one will be able to index it and most will be annoyed by having to deal with it.

Sumer had its heyday but what do you really remember about it?