Converging with Flash

Jan 15, 2007

I'm sure everyone has seen the iPhone release, read about the features and dreamed about the day it becomes available. One thing I've been thinking about since seeing the release is convergence. The iPhone has phone, voicemail , email and browser support, not to mention photos, movies , music , and applications . At the turn of the century I worked for a telecommunications company, they were constantly touting 'convergence' as the next big thing. I'm not sure anyone completely understood what it meant, or what it could be, but they were selling it. From there I moved to a software company that developed collaboration software. One of the key selling features was 'convergence', the promise of your email, voicemail and fax all in one inbox that could be accessed from your phone, browser or wireless device (which at that point, was nothing compared to today?s devices). That seemed more like convergence, everything in one place and many ways to access it. It's been almost five years since I left that company and I haven?t really heard much of, or thought a lot about, convergence until just recently, with the iPhone release.

Now Apple is bringing to market a device that promises to deliver 'convergence', all forms of communication and entertainment bundled into a sleek little package, but that is not the convergence I have been thinking of. I've been thinking a lot about convergence towards the Flash player and Flash/Flex in general and how it is the perfect mechanism to deliver the 'convergence' that everyone has touted. There really is not another platform out there that can seamlessly deliver text, audio, video, and soon speech (if you believe everything you hear and read) across the spectrum of the devices used to access that information. Computers (PC or Mac with Linux on the way), wireless devices, gaming devices (PSP, Wii, PS3). Flash is becoming ingrained into the internet landscape, people do not even think twice about how the content is being delivered, they just know it's being delivered (video on YouTube, music on Myspace widgets, maps on Yahoo maps). The upcoming release of Apollo promises to further blur the line between offline and online content, connected versus standalone client. A whole community of Flash/Flex developers will now be enabled to release desktop applications that can run completely outside of the traditional web browser.

With consumer demand for increased, easier and more interactive access to online content and service providers demand for new value added services it seems only a logical step that Flash will be one of the primary tools used to meet the demands. If you watch the iPhone demo video and see how interactive the interface is, one universal delivery mechanism immediately comes to mind and it's not AJAX. Flash is the only multi platform, client independent plugin that can deliver that type of functionality. Imagine being able to simultaneously deploy an application that can run on the desktop of any computer, many wireless devices (especially the most popular) and many gaming devices, providing all users with a single user experience and access to all of the same content. The reality is you do not need to imagine it, that reality is 80% here today and the last 20% will be arriving soon.

So where am I going with all of this ? two places. First, this an extremely exciting time to be in this industry (by industry I mean Flash/Flex development in general, which is quite all encompassing). Everyone has hyped web 2.0 to death, and how it was/is the next big wave of all things internet based. If web 2.0's definition is collaboration, community and sharing, and AJAX and RSS are the enabling buzzwords of all the hype, then I believe this is something entirely different, at least from a development perspective. This excitement is all about 'convergence', devices converging to content through a common platform, the Flash platform. Second, this is a fantastic time to be a Flash/Flex developer for two reasons. One, demand for all things Flash based is rising and the market of good developers does not seem to be keeping up with demand, simple economics of supply and demand means only one thing, the cost of development increases, which is good news for Flash developers. Two, all this demand from 'convergence' will really drive creative and innovative solutions, Flash has never been a boring medium to work with, and it certainly will not become that in the foreseeable future; VoIP in Flash, touch screen interaction, access to OS API?s. I can hardly wait to see what the future holds for Flash application development.