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April 05, 2007
Great Article on Flash, Flex and Apollo in The Guardian
Charles Arthur wrote a great piece on Flash, Flex and Apollo in today's tech section of The Guardian, based on an interview I did with him when I visited the UK a little while ago. Overall, I was really happy with the contents and tone of the story. He really hit on the key points I was trying to get across about how Flash has evolved, how we are moving it forward with Flex and Apollo, and how it is enabling people to do new things on the web.However, while reading Ryan Stewart's post about the story, he said "I’m a card-carrying member of the Mark Anders fan club, but saying that Flash is the new publishing tool of the century is a bit much" and two things confused me. First, members of my fan club have secret decoder rings, not member-ship cards, but more importantly, I had no idea what he was talking about with "the new publishing tool of the century" line. Where did that come from?
So I went back and re-read the article and it was then that I found out that it was actually the title of the story and that I supposedly said it! Now, I don't remember using those words, and interestingly, in the article they do not appear within quotes. However, in looking at the context of the statement, I think I understand what it means.
One of the things that I did talk to Charles about was that the type of content that people publish on the Internet has been changing and moving beyond text and images . YouTube of course has been a runaway success in web video and one of the key things on MySpace has been for bands to publish their music via embedded music players. In each of these cases, both of which are among the most popular sites on the internet, Flash has been the enabling technology.
Now, did Flash create web video? No, and neither did YouTube. But in the many articles I've read about YouTube's success, one of the key differentiators mentioned is that their video player "didn't require users to download and install software."
Of course, this isn't technically true. People did have to download the Flash Player. However, because we have always kept it small and made installation smooth and worked hard to get it on the vast majority of machines out there, the experience for almost everyone has been that they go to YouTube and it just works.
So while I don't recall saying that "Flash is the new publishing tool of the century", I do believe that as we've moved into the 21st century, the web has transformed to include more than just text and images, and that Flash has been an enabler of that shift to a richer web experience.
Posted by Mark Anders at April 5, 2007 03:22 PM
Comments
Damnit, I didn't realize I was in the *fake* Mark Anders fan club. Dejecting.
And you're right, I saw the quotes in the title, then assumed when reading through that it was a direct quote. But on second inspection, you're right, it's not a direct quote.
The lesson as always; I'm an idiot.
Good article though.
Posted by: Ryan Stewart at April 5, 2007 04:23 PM
Ryan, no worries. The decoder ring and other official membership swag is on its way to you! Also, there are quotes in the headline, so it sure looks like I said it!
Posted by: Mark Anders ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.andersblog.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 5, 2007 04:32 PM
A couple of points I take issue with in the article, from the actual author not Mark:
"So is the difference simply that the spread of broadband made Flash more acceptable, by cutting the delays while files load?" - this viewpoint that flash takes forever to load is so damaging to the public's perception of flash. Especially when being written by a national newspaper. Whilst it is true in that alot of flash sites are heavy, we all know it's not flash's fault but that of the developer. Would make selling flash sites/apps so much easier if this wasn't the generally accepted view.
"Career: 1995 Joined Microsoft, where he mainly worked with ASP.NET 2004" - isn't that a bit be-littling? As I understand it you were far more instrumental in ASP.NET than that which had they represented could have given far more credability to you to the average joe schmoe reading the article who isn't up on the who's who of geekdom.
Otherwise it's excellent seeing such exposure to our chosen platform on such a wide reaching audience. :)
(and yeah maybe I am being a picky git, I'm just a fan of the tools we use and Adobe gives us and want to see the public see em in the same light)
Posted by: DannyT at April 6, 2007 03:11 AM
Danny, thanks for your kind words. As for the two things you point out. With respect to the broadband issue, the way I interpreted what Charles said was more in reference to some of the ways Flash is used, specifically for things like video, rather than a statement about Flash itself.
As for the bio, I didn't really take offense. He did say earlier in the article that I was one of the lead designers on ASP.NET, which in some ways isn't really accurate either, but that's ok.
Note, the way you copied the text from the quote isn't really what was said. It wasn't saying that I mainly worked on ASP.NET 2004 -- the 2004 was when I joined Macromedia.
But you are correct, my actual role was that Scott Guthrie and I started the ASP.NET team. For the first 6 months or so it was just us two. As we built and grew the team, I was in charge of it. Later, other technologies were merged into the ASP.NET team to become the .NET Framework team and I headed up that as well.
Overall, I do think that Charles wrote a really good article and that the technologies came off very well.
Thanks for your sticking up for the technology and me!
Posted by: Mark Anders at April 6, 2007 08:04 PM
Fantastic article. I am an avid ready of The Guardian and always monitor their Media, Technology and Business sections but somehow never read this article which is of great interest to me.
Thanks for informing us!
Posted by: MediaRoots at May 4, 2007 04:47 PM
Link moved on the Guardian site, the article is now at http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,,2049933,00.html
Posted by: ohwhen at October 3, 2007 06:24 AM