John Nack: Adobe isn’t in the Flash business

From Adobe's John Nack, who's this reasonable probably because he works on Photoshop rather than, y'know, that other app:

[Adobe's] in the helping people communicate business. We'd all do well to remember that, because it means that the company's fortunes are tied to building great tools for solving problems. If we do that well, we prosper; if we do it poorly, we fail. When we get too wrapped up in this technology or that, we lose touch with the problems that we (and more importantly our customers) are trying to solve.

John's absolutely right, though it's not like Adobe's being criticized because InDesign makes it too easy to use tacky fonts in a brochure. He's right that there's room for an opinion somewhere between "Flash is evil" and "Pulsing penis buttons are hotttttt", but the issue here isn't just that Flash sites are tacky.

The Web is about communicating in ways that go beyond just getting a client's message across. It's also about sustainable information systems, and information that depends on a plugin that eats 95% CPU while idle isn't good, or useful, or sustainable, for anyone.