Except that in this analogy, Lynch wasn't the defense attorney, he was the defendant, and he was committing the crime in front of the judge, jury, and prosecution.
But the analogy is weak. He was the CTO, not the PR dept. he made the decisions he was defending. He was wrong. That's an important thing to watch out for in a CTO.
On the plus side, Bob Mansfield suffers no fools. Lynch will be awesome, or disappear.
That was the first thought that I came in my mind when I read the article. Especially because he was CTO of Adobe who was deep into Flash then. He is not going to be hand in hand with Steve J and say, yes let's just forget Flash. I feel, people sometimes over analyse things.
Deeper issues? I respect John and his blog a lot, but this post is a bit of bologna. Kevin Lynch had faith in his product and was defending it when under scrutiny, just as the Adobe CTO should. It wasn't even that obvious that Flash would turn out to be a failure on mobile, but hindsight is 20/20 for Gruber and I guess he thinks it entitles him to personally judge a person based on one failure. It's almost as if he himself has never failed.
applying hindsight retroactively and prognosticating on that basis seems like a bozo kind of idea...
(post takes a single piece of Kevin's writing about Flash, from a then-Adobe staffer, from a few years back, and extrapolates - move along, nothing interesting here)
Three years a go most people recognized Flash for what it is. The only platform on which Flash works well is desktop Windows, and even there it's a CPU hog with serious security vulnerabilities. By 2010, Gruber had been writing about Flash' many faults for years – this was 3 years after the introduction of the iPhone. Lynch must've known Flash was a sick puppy, he just couldn't bring himself to euthanize it.
Presumably, Apple didn't hire Kevin Lynch to bring the wonders of Flash to iOS, so his PR speak on the topic isn't terribly relevant. If anything, it shows he was loyal to his employer, defending and promoting a technology that he knew smelled like poop. That's a trait Apple looks for in its job applicants as well.
I would much rather have companies responsible for non-Apple products to keep going with their vision than to just roll over and give up just because Apple said it was dead. As if Apple can never be wrong. Fuck that. Keep doing what you're doing... and quit giving Apple so much power.
In Ancestor's Tale [highly recommended] Richard Dawkins describes the incredible sensory organ that is the Duck Billed Platypus's bill as a marvel of evolution. He points out that "being primitive is not a full time way of life."
Likewise, neither is being wrong.
Most predictions are just shoveling the present into the future and often they look silly after a few years.
Your example cite doesn't help your case. Nokia shares have been in the toilet since the Microsoft debacle. As soon as former MSFT VP Elop made a big move at Nokia (the burning platform speech), the stock dropped 20% in a week, and continued down ever since.
More than anything Gruber was pretty much right. How different (read: better) is Nokia's position compared to Yahoo?
Firstly he is not a bozo because he made that statement. He is a bozo for releasing slow, buggy, insecure Flash versions. Apple had every reason not to want it on their phone given the statistics they get from CrashReporter.
Secondly Bob Mansfield is one tough, demanding, ridiculously smart guy who has a long history of delivering. The fact that Kevin Lynch is reporting to him says it all. He is very much on probation and will have his ass handed to him super quickly if he doesn't live up to expectations.
To be fair, a lot of people thought Flash was going to be better on Android than it turned out to be. I still don't know how they managed to make it so bad. The input model was bad. The performance was awful. There were security issues that affected the Android version as well IIRC. Lots of people were wrong about lots of technology three years ago.
It wasn't bad. I used to watch Conan episodes all the time on the Nexus One, something I wouldn't have been able to do had it not been for flash. There was also the Kongregate games which worked well.
Most flash content wasn't made for touch, so in that respect it was imperfect but judging it for what it was, it was fine. There's a lot of hindsight going on painting flash on mobile to being much worse than it really was. The reality is that flash on mobile failed because it wasn't on the iPhone and no matter how great it might have been elsewhere it would have still failed because it wasn't on the iPhone.
Maybe we had different expectations. I was an early Android (Droid OG) adopter and admittedly was one of the people that thought Flash on Android would be useful. Maybe it was simply my perception of it being useless since HTML5 was already making a splash for mobile video (similar to the point you make), but outside of using on vacation to stream a video from Subsonic, I found it to be pretty slow to the point of being annoying to use (the same way most people perceived Android pre-GB/ICS/JB). By time I got a phone like the Galaxy Nexus that could probably power it seamlessly, there just wasn't any use for it any more.
I think the performance varied from device-to-device and from site-to-site. The heavier uses tended to perform worse, the flash games designed for mobile tended to perform much better.
But it's really moot, flash on mobile didn't fail because of quality, it failed because it wasn't on the iPhone. A cross-platform runtime that's not cross-platform is pretty worthless, no matter the quality of it.
