Yesterday we started a discussion on what Adobe could and should share with us developers in regards to penetration data and market data. And thats all well and good. Adobe should by all means share what they can - that just benefits us all. But I really don't like the accusatory tone in the discussion. After all what possible reason would Adobe have for not making all of our lives easier?
So therefore I conclude that Adobe are doing their very best to help us all. Not enough all of the time but surely the best they can. After all they started shipping FL enabled phones a little more than a year ago and have - as best we can see managed to already be present on somewhere in the region of 20% of European phones. And a lot more japanese phones. And the work they are doing with Verizon will probably mean that sometime soon we'll see a lot of phones in the US also with some form of FL capability or another. So lets not bash Adobe to much - they just need a little friendly spanking once in a while so they do not become to complacent :-) But lets focus on how to use the possibilities we have right now.
In our daily work we approach a new company on average 3 times a week (and keep in mind we a from Denmark which is like the smallest country in the known universe). We always get a great reception and always manage to get a great WOW effect from what we present - and then someone asks: But how many people can actually see this?
In the beginning we tried all manner of ways to get around this question. We lied. We told half truths. We invented convenient truths. But since we have started telling the actual truth - that we don't really know but all our research indicate around 15-20% today. - we get a lot more attention. Because our clients are not stupid. They know that 15-20% today will lead to 50-60 maybe 70% tomorrow and that the mobile world is moving really quickly :-) And they know that if they sign of anything today it will take 3-6 months on average to hit the public anyway...
We also do our own little field study where we take in all of the advertising about mobile phones we can and then compare the phones being advertised against FL compatibility. And this is very encouraging. In Denmark its some 75-80% at the moment. I would encourage all of you to create similar stats - ours can be seen here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pjKq2RPI6RF7DNPRV8VGdCA&hl=en_US. If others create similar documents for differentt countries we could all easily compare notes and get a broader picture of the world tomorrow - without having to purchase this info for a fortune - and besides - clients really dig this go get 'em attitude of doing it yourself :-)
So the story we push to our potential clients now is that they have a great opportunity to become first movers in the mobile space. And where 8 months ago people just had to be able to talk about mobile to be cool, today they actually have to know because they have to build something mobile to be cool. And that makes our everyday a lot easier.
So in short i guess its up to us as developers to invent our own business cases - Adobe can't be expected to invent them for us after all - and then we have to find convincing stories to sell to our clients. After all they are no different than end users - our clients also buy engaging mobile experiences and great stories...
Hope I can inspire some of you to focus more on creating usable content and getting the FL content ball moving as fast as Adobe has moved the FL player ball out there...
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8 comments:
I would suggest that Adobe could do at least a little more to make the player available. For those phones that have the capability, but don't have it pre-installed, it is nearly impossible for an average user to go to the website and download and install the player. The process is far too difficult.
Agreed - but I really don't beleive Adobe has ever had the thought of delivering the player OTA. I believe Adobe is a licence business and that Adobe is making its money from making deals with the OEMs - and as far as I know they have made deals with all the important ones out there?
So we all need to get started showing the OEMS and the carriers that Flash Lite is a great way to create engaging content - and the clients are out there - they may just be hard to find :-)
why would adobe not want to make the player more available--ie from wap download for example--no way that it can eat into the market so much that it would drive them out of business. but instead it would SHOW to OEM's that there is a market demand because xxx number of people are downloading the player ota.
I am sure Adobe wouldn't mind if everybody in the known universe had a flash player installed or at least the option to have it installed :-) But maybe Nokia for instance would have a hard time seeing why they should pay for something thats free? Also my point isn't that I would mind if the player was available OTA - but more that since its not and since penetration is not something we as developers can affect anyway why dont we try and focus on the stuff we can affect? Such as showing the carriers all the cool stuff we can make and showing the 20% or so actually able to play with our content how cool it is so that they will start generating higher demand towards the OEMs...
http://www.aviarts.com/blog/?cat=4
Another source for penetration data
Also from the same post this link:
http://www.flashdevices.net/downloads/Creating-and-Selling-Your-Mobile-Flash-Content-bperry.zip
Any other sources please post them here or mail me the links and i'll post 'em
"But maybe Nokia for instance would have a hard time seeing why they should pay for something thats free?"
this is perhaps part of the reasoning behind the lack of Flash/Flashlite on the iPhone (apart from technical issues getting the full flash player on there).
My gut feeling is that Adobe are hoping there is enough public outrage over the omission to then force Apple's hand.
I am fairly certain that Apple will post a software update that will contain an actual working web browser fairly quickly (including Flash and Java). Or they will find that the amount of they get will drop rapidly - aftar all why would i watch Youtube on my iPhone when it doesnt show flv's?
Two points to make - my apologies for having to be anonymous.
1. Adobe may not be able to publish the numbers. For example, it's public information which phone models have the player - and giving a number of shipped players exactly would indicate how many of those phone models the OEMs have shipped - and that's a data point OEMs are guarding fiercly.
2. Adobe does not want to have FL only as a standalone player but also as a web browser plugin (and maybe other integration points). Current mobile browsers don't have standard plugin APIs which means that the player has to be pre-installed...
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