News links: Daring Fireball: Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Leaves to Join Apple
Kevin Lynch is a pretty neat guy, and he’s been one of the higher-ups at Adobe that I’ve passively followed around for a while. I couldn’t quite remember how I had known about him for so long until I went to the archived version of his site and recognized the layout of his old blog.
Some of the articles today mention that he was a proponent of Flash and frame that decision as a mistake… but I suspect that he wasn’t the only cook in the kitchen. His projects related to Flash circa 2003:
Let’s break that down and imagine what would happen if Adobe hadn’t screwed everything up by buying Macromedia in 2005:
[LIST]
[]“openly publishing the Flash file format”* – Could’ve lead to a fully open-source Flash Player.
[]“joining the W3C”* – Could’ve lead to Flash being made into a W3C standard, then we’d have had HTML5 way earlier. 
[]"bundle the Flash Player”* – More evidence that Flash could have been a more standard part of the web, sooner.
[]“starting our usability initiatives”* – Flash could have avoided complaints about SEO, accessibility, and non-standard UI conventions.
[]“starting our […] mobile initiatives”* – Flash could have been critically important enough to have landed on the original iPhone.
[]“blending more server DNA into Macromedia” *-- Could’ve beaten node.js to the punch by about a decade.
[/LIST]
Sure, okay, it’s very unlikely that all of those things would have happened, and I’m unfairly placing a lot of blame on Adobe because I don’t know the exact power struggles that occurred internally, but it sounds to me like the Flash that Kevin Lynch wanted was a lot different than what we got.
[whisper]You could probably make similar arguments for people even more fundamental to the development of Flash, but that’s less relevant to today’s news.[/whisper]
