Help! It’s A Flash Killer!

The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of news and rumors about Flash, with the funny thing being that surprisingly little of it actually had anything to actually do with the Macromedia product itself. The long and short of this recent Flash flurry is that a lot of it points, either directly or indirectly, to the emergence of yet another "Flash Killer," this time with our fine friends in Redmond driving the bus.

It's dead, Jim

One piece of news to emerge recently (albeit quietly) is the death of what was, at one time, also referred to as a "Flash Killer." Adobe has announced that effective November 15, 2003 (which may have come and gone by the time you read this), it is discontinuing its LiveMotion product. Like many of you, I had heard reports from as far back as a year ago about the low morale of the LiveMotion team, that while even as LM2 was a pretty darned nice SWF authoring environment, it would never be able to catch up with Flash itself as long as Macromedia retained ultimate control over the latest and greatest SWF spec. I'm a little sad about this turn of events, as LM2 really showed some potential. But I'm not exactly shocked, either. Macromedia owns Flash, and if they want to keep the most recent SWF spec close to the vest, that's their call. But the big MM shouldn't take Adobe's capitulation in the SWF authoring space as a sign that they're doing everything right. Flash MX 2004 is a nice product and all, but it's getting its share of panning from the developer community, with a heavy share of criticism coming from designers who complain that Macromedia has focused so much on the RIA side of the coin that Flash is ripe for a beatdown in the design and animation space. It's valid criticism, in my opinion. Someone may just sneak up on Macromedia and provide a compelling new product that addresses these very design shortcomings, one that just might evoke as much jaw-dropping as Flash itself did when it burst on the scene lo those many years ago.

Enter "Sparkle"

That "someone" might just have been Creature House, who were poised to strike with an animated version of their flagship Expression package, called LivingCels. Not familiar with either product? Here's the gist: Expression lets you draw vector-based artwork, but with a twist. You can apply decidedly non-vector effects to Expression's strokes, resulting in some really, REALLY nice stuff that's all done in vectors. I was an original Expression 1 user dating back to 1996, when Fractal Design first introduced it, and it's the real deal. LivingCels expands upon the Expression model, adding animation capabilities with the same distinct looks Expression is capable of. There are some downright beautiful examples of both on the Creature House site. Hmm...all the benefits of a vector format combined with artistic strokes? You can see where this might have been going.

Apparently, Microsoft also saw where this was going, and snapped up Creature House in a not-entirely-recent maneuver that only recently was actually noticed. As of this writing, there is no way to purchase or even download Creature House products, so the "hows" and "whys" of this particular assimilation are very much to be determined. But one doesn't have to be Oliver Stone to put two and two together after another little tidbit of "news" burst on the rumor scene: the apparent inclusion of what's being called the next Flash killer into Microsoft's forthcoming Longhorn OS, presently known (officially or unofficially) as "Sparkle"." In spite of the name, which, if official, tells you all you need to know about the current level of innovation at Redmond, Sparkle looks to be a Flash-like technology that is not only integrated into whatever incarnation of IE will ship with Longhorn, but is supposedly hooked into the OS at a much lower level, enabling Sparkle content to be present at the application level as well.

Details are, of course, sketchy at this point as to what "is" is when it comes to Sparkle, but if you take everything together, all signs point to Microsoft gunning for at least a piece of the Flash pie. Aside from the Creature House acquisition and the buzz about what Sparkle may or may not be, two other developments might figure into all this. One, if you recall about a year ago, the big rumor floating around was that Microsoft was in acquisition talks with Macromedia itself, talks that apparently didn't amount to anything. I'm not at all sure why that went south, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if there were some bad blood between the two sides, resulting in added incentive for Microsoft to try and take down a core piece of Macromedia's business. Two, there's a little thing of the Eolas patent verdict. Without going into too much detail, what the MS loss in that case ultimately means is that early next year, when Microsoft is scheduled to unleash a Eolas-happy update for IE, sites that contain Flash (or other technologies that require plug-ins, or, more accurately, ActiveX controls to function) are going to behave pretty funkily unless designers jump through a few seemingly odd code hoops to make their pages function normally again.

What, me worry?

So let's see...we've got the death of Flash's main rival (or, at least, it's been left for dead). We've got a vector-based animation product acquisition. We've got a rumored Flash-esque technology that will be built into the core Longhorn OS as well as IE. We've got potential spite directed at Macromedia. We've got a patent dispute that will soon mean that it'll be a relative hassle to include (let's call it) third-party content inside the market share-dominant IE browser. I could be way off base and have likely adopted an X-Files mentality here, but I'm going to assume for the purposes of this discussion that Microsoft is indeed developing what it hopes will be a Flash killer. With that admittedly lengthy buildup out of the way, here are five reasons I, as a long-time Flash user, am not worried (and why you shouldn't be either):

1) Why does Flash need to be killed? OK, so that sounds like more of a question than a reason, but bear with me. Did I miss something here? Is Flash such an awful technology that is must die? Is it so loathed by developers that they sit around and pray that something comes along and puts Flash out of their collective misery? Uh, no. Despite its problems, Flash is a mature, and, more importantly, entrenched technology that's used happily by a whole lot of designers and developers in both online and offline projects. It's cross-platform (Linux included). It's cross-browser. Hell, it's even cross-media. Someone's going to have to come up with something awfully good to make folks rush to delete Flash from their hard drives.

2) 2006, baby. 2006. At best, Longhorn is two years away, and four years out at worst. A lot can happen between now and then. I'm pretty sure I'll be working on a G9 with Mac OS XX by then, with a flying car tethered to the fire hydrant in my front yard and a robot maid named Rosie. I don't think Macromedia is going to sit idly by for all those years and let Flash wither on the vine just because they don't have a main competitor anymore. At least, I'm guessing that Macromedia won't rest on Flash's laurels. If they do let Flash languish, and it isn't a vastly different, more evolved, and better product by then, it'll deserve whatever might be lying in wait.

3) Haven't we been here before? Call me crazy, but Flash has already weathered a few assassination attempts—even one from Microsoft—yet still remains king. In the late 90's MS had its own Flash killer, Liquid Motion, which itself was killed off in early 2000. All it takes is to read this review from the time and you'll see why Liquid Motion is no longer with us. Proprietary, kludgey, and with a penchant for disgusting results. Sounds like a winner! And do I really need to mention again that the most recent Flash killer, LiveMotion, has been left to rot? All this attempted Flashicide sometimes serves as an excellent reminder of what's really good about Flash. And the fact that so many products have evolved as a complement, rather than a competitor, to Flash and the SWF format is an even better reminder of what Macromedia has done very right to date.

4) Quick. Name how many "creative" MS apps you use. I'll wait. Any minute now...I'm sure it'll take a while to put together such an extensive list. Now, I don't know about you, but I get to my desk every day, fire up Paint, create beautiful images with its advanced toolset, switch over to FrontPage to generate clean, unbloated and standards-compliant HTML pages for those images to live in, and call it a day. I hope that little scenario has underscored the fact that MS has exactly zero credibility as a creator and/or purveyor of creative software, and the acquisition of Creature House isn't likely to change that well-earned reputation. I just can't see a scenario where all the Flash designers out there migrate en masse to a new, Microsoft branded Flash replacement, can you? As an aside, one can only hope that MS decides to do for Creature House what it did for game maker Bungie: leave it alone and let it do what it does (for the most part). Still waiting on Halo for the Mac like Bungie/MS promised when it was acquired, though.

5) OK, so MS manages to pull it off. So what? Look, let's get some perspective here. If MS somehow does end up killing (or, at least, severely maiming) Flash, I'll adapt. So will a lot of other designers. We might use Sparkle (which will probably have a predictably crippled Mac version and accompanying plug-in, considering the antitrust hot water MS is still in, especially in Europe). Or we might use something else. Or we might move into other areas of creative production. Or, we might even change vocations if we're just fed up. People adapt with the times, and even MS killing Flash won't change that.

And in the end...

Whether or not Sparkle is aiming for Flash, it'll have a tough road towards acceptance, especially amongst designers. In any event, there's a whole lot o' waiting to do before any real questions get answered, so, as usual, the best advice is to watch closely and enjoy the soap opera as it unfolds. And whatever happens, don't get too squirrely about the outcome—life's too short not to roll with the punches.

Filed under: Opinion on November 14th, 2003

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