Apple, Adobe, and the Flash eLearning Future

I've had a few requests from customers and prospects to address some questions raised by the firestorm of corporate rhetoric between Adobe and Apple and the "future of Flash". If you're not familiar with this subject, you may want visit these links for starters:

Apple's CEO on Flash - http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Adobe's CEO in response - http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/tab/liveblog/

First of all, this discussion between these tech industry corporate powerhouses is far from over. Still, the discussion and all of the media attention it has garnered has raised some questions.

There are really three questions to discuss here:

1. Will Steve Jobs' vision prevail meaning that Flash is going to eventually go away?
2. If (a big "IF") Flash does "go away", since e-learning created with Rapid Intake e-learning software is currently consumed in the Flash player, what are Rapid Intake's plans to deal with that?
3. Even if Flash doesn't "go away", it's pretty clear that Apple won't be supporting Flash on its mobile devices. Does Rapid Intake have any plans to make e-learning created with its tools consumable on mobile devices?

Let me first acknowledge that any position taken by Apple right now does have to be taken seriously. Apple as a brand is very popular right now and has a lot of brand capital to spend in the marketplace in terms of its influence. That acknowledgment made, let's take a closer look at these questions. I'll address each question in order.

IS FLASH GOING TO DIE?

First, is Flash going to completely disappear, die, or go away? Emphatically, the answer is "Not a Chance!" In spite of Apple and Steve Jobs, there is too much investment into Flash content for it to go away completely, and let's be real, there is no real alternative to Flash right now. As much as Jobs would like to make the world think so, currently there is no real replacement. He talks about HTML5, but the specification is far from being completed and full adoption into browsers will take time (read that "years").

Let's look at one important reality. What is one of the single most important reasons Flash was adopted so widely in the first place? Cross-browser compatibility for rich, interactive content. Without the Flash player, designing in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, you have to be sure that what you create works in every browser. Frankly, it doesn't. This is the biggest problem with Jobs' vision. Not only is HTML5 far from being a replacement for Flash right now, even if it were, only the very latest browsers support it. How many corporations are going to jump to the latest browser overnight, even it there were a good replacement option for Flash (which there isn't yet)? Even if "everyone" (which is essentially who has adopted Flash over the years) adopts HTML5, this is going to take years, folks.

In the e-learning world Flash has become the standard for most leading authoring tools. This is not only due to the benefit that Flash can play the same content the same way in almost all browsers, but also because Flash has been designed from the ground up for interactivity. Flash Player 10 and Actionscript 3 (the programming language behind Flash) are the best things to happen for e-learning interactivity on the Internet. Rapid Intake's new Actionscript 3 output (as of yet unreleased) will support this.

Another reason Flash won't die: it has become the de facto standard for rich media development on the web. 99% of all Internet users view Flash content on the Internet currently (see http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/). As of the end of 2009, there are reportedly 1.8 billion Internet users (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). This means that 1.78 billion Internet users are currently using the Flash player to view and interact with web content. Again, even IF (and that is a pretty big "IF") the Internet moves away from Flash as the main rich media consumption tool, it's not going to be for quite a while.

Here are two more argument to slow down the pace of change. Because Flash has been a de facto standard, billions of dollars have been poured into Flash content development by all levels of government, industry, and education. Switching will cost additional billions, and all of those organizations are not going to switch without a fuss. Again, more time, if the switching really happens at all. As an analogy, a similar comparison might be said of PDF documents. In spite of what Jobs says, Flash is an open specification (meaning that Adobe allows other publishers to publish to Flash, not just Adobe). Similarly, PDF is another open specification published by Adobe that has been adopted worldwide. Do you really think we're all just going to discard PDF documents overnight, even if there were a better alternative (which there isn't)? No, there's too much invested in it at all levels to make any kind of switch quickly. The same goes for Flash.

Finally, Adobe is no small player in the software industry. Though much less savvy about leveraging the media machine that Apple is so good at, Adobe is not going to see Flash and its dominant market position take this beating without a fight. As an example, there is an anti-trust enquiry into Apple's exclusion of Flash on the iPhone and iPad (more on mobile devices further down). See http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/an_antitrust_app_buvCWcJdjFoLD5vBSkguGO.

That said, will Flash always have the same dominant place on the Internet it has enjoyed over the last six or seven years? Probably not. It will compete with other ways of delivering interactive rich media, but I have no doubt it will still be a big player for many years to come.

WHAT DO WE DO IF FLASH DOES GO AWAY?

Though the pace of change may be slow (IF it changes), we still have to take this discussion seriously. Fortunately, all of this aside, Rapid Intake is in an excellent position to move with the technology as it changes. Why? Rapid Intake software is based on XML. This means that we separate the "data layer" from the "consumption layer". This is so much techno-geek speak, so I'll explain it in another way.

When you create content in Rapid Intake, your data, your content, is stored in a open web-standard format called XML. In short, this is a text document that defines everything about the course from the order of topics and pages and the text on the page to where the media assets, such as images and audio, are stored. Then this content is "pulled into" the Flash player dynamically. The XML file is the "data layer" and the Flash player is the "consumption layer", meaning it is what is used by the learner to consume the content.

What this means is that if needed, we can change the consumption layer to something like HTML5 without having to change much, if any, of the content layer. In other words, if we do need to go this route down the road, you will be able to publish the same content to HTML5 as an output that can then be consumed outside of the Flash player.

WHAT ABOUT MOBILE DEVICES AND RAPID INTAKE?

Though Apple is not the only mobile player (Microsoft and Google Android are both saying they will support Flash), Apple is enjoying immense popularity right now. Apple's exclusion of Flash on its mobile devices raises the question of how to move Rapid Intake content to the mobile future.

At Rapid Intake are finalizing a mobile deployment strategy. While I can't give you all of the details, in short, courses made with Rapid Intake will be able to run on multiple devices whether they are Flash-enabled or not. Again, because our presentation layer is different from our data layer, porting the content to mobile devices, while not trivial, will not be a complete rewrite of our software--it will simply be writing special output templates for mobile devices that read the same content that the Flash player currently reads.

In a word, Rapid Intake, in the future, will allow you to build content in one location and publish to multiple consumption mediums: browser-based, mobile device, and document download.

SUMMARY
In summary, our prediction is that Flash will play a dominant role in browser-based consumption for many years to come and even when a truly viable replacement is available, it will take years beyond that for all levels of industry, government, and academia to make the switch. Switching 1.78 billion users (and growing) will take time. So this is a long-term question and strategy, not a short-term knee-jerk problem. In the meantime, at Rapid Intake we are monitoring these developments closely and are prepared to leverage our "data layer" design to move content to other consumption models, including mobile devices.

Garin Hess | CEO
Rapid Intake Inc.
www.rapidintake.com

Rapid Intake. eLearning Tools Without Limits.


UPDATE 5/14/2010: A couple of interesting new links: http://connecttheworld.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/14/adobe-and-apple-continue-to-do-battle/ and http://www.adobe.com/choice/

UPDATE 5/15/2010: Here's an article on Fortune that explains in more detail why Adobe, though under siege, probably won't have severe problems in spite of Jobs' influence: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/14/why-adobe-shouldn’t-give-a-about-apple/?cnn=yes

UPDATE 6/2/2010: http://shoutout.rapidintake.com/2010/05/apple-adobe-and-flash-elearning-future.html

UPDATE 6/3/2010 Here's another excellent article, though most of these articles that tout the power of HTML5 are simply ignoring the fact that HTML5 is in its infancy stages whereas Flash is at its best level of maturity. http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/465/

My response to this article (in the comments: First of all, very good article. Appreciate the sample links. HTML is impressive and will surely take market share from Flash, but trying to compare the current state of HTML to Flash capabilities is like comparing a nice low-end Hyundai to a Ferrari. The examples shown here are a lot like old Flash 2 samples. Let's be real. There is NO COMPARISON in HTML 5 to what you can do in Flash. Actionscript 3 as an object-oriented language along with Flash Player 10 is several magnitudes more powerful in its capabilities for interactive e-learning than HTML5. HTML5 will grow in its adoption, but replacing Flash in a serious way will take years and unless adoption of the specification is more robust than adoptions of CSS and Javascript in the past, it will be plagued with cross-browser compatibility problems, which is why Flash has been a God-send to the e-learning development community.

Fortunately at Rapid Intake we store data in XML which means learning content can be re-purposed to HTML5 if needed. That said, my prediction is that Flash is and will remain the most powerful influence on e-learning for years to come, in spite of what Steve Jobs says. The ecosystem built up around Flash is enormous and cannot be discounted with a few web articles.