# Kevin Lynch goes from (Macromedia to) Adobe to Apple

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/kevin-lynch-goes-from-macromedia-to-adobe-to-apple/330811>\
**Category:** random\
**Created:** [March 19, 2013, 11:33pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/kevin-lynch-goes-from-macromedia-to-adobe-to-apple/330811 "2013-03-19T23:33:13Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![krilnon](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex011/user_avatar/forum.kirupa.com/krilnon/32/34_2.png) [@krilnon](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/krilnon)\
**Post date:** [March 19, 2013, 11:33pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/kevin-lynch-goes-from-macromedia-to-adobe-to-apple/330811/1 "2013-03-19T23:33:13Z")

</div>

News links: [Daring Fireball: Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch Leaves to Join Apple](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/19/lynch-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](http://web.archive.org/web/20050406064817/http://www.klynch.com/) 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:

> [@Kevin Lynch in 2003](#):
>
> I’ve also championed efforts such as openly publishing the Flash file format, joining the W3C, helping to convince Netscape to be the first to bundle the Flash Player, starting our usability initiatives and mobile initiatives, and blending more server DNA into Macromedia with Allaire Corporation.

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]

:2c: