Watching the back and forth going on between Adobe and Apple around Apple’s lack of support for Flash on its iPhone and iPad reminds me of an earlier time in computing history, the early 1990s, when Delrina was a rising star and its flagship product, WinFax Pro, was taking the market by storm. WinFax was the leading product on the market that took advantage of optical character recognition technology to let you send and receive faxes directly from your desktop, rather than requiring an actual fax machine. The fax software market was taking off, and Delrina looked like it was going places.

Then, when Windows 95 came out it embedded fax capabilities directly on the desktop, and within a few years Delrina and its competitors were pretty much completely wiped off the face of the map (Symantec purchased Delrina, sold off various products and the founders scattered). This was a classic example of the platform expanding to destroy the market for a particular class of application, and there are countless other examples of this phenomenon in the annals of computing history.

Watching the tussle between these two tech giants makes me wonder if we’re about to see the same thing happen yet again. Don’t get me wrong, I actually have a soft spot in my heart for Adobe and its Creative Suite, having project work to support one of the early launches of Creative Suite, and I have tremendous respect for its ability to fend off larger competitors and continue to release best in class products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and, yes, Flash.
But with HTML 5, things are likely to get more interesting. In the draft stages at the standards bodies that govern HTML, it is being championed by the likes of Apple and Google. It is likely to roll out in the next couple of years, with certain components likely to be supported by a number of websites even sooner. And the key is, HTML 5 supports standards for embedded video, obviating the need for an add-in like Flash. While this will all still need to be worked out, and in fact there are still competing standards vying for the ultimate HTML 5 video codec crown, the point is that sooner or later a video standard will become part of generic old HTML, and the platform will have grown to engulf the market for video players in HTML.

So what’s a company like Adobe to do? Fortunately (at least compared to the Delrina example), it has several other revenue-producing flagship products it can fall back on. But when it comes to video players, that’s a tougher nut to crack. One approach would be to become compatible with the evolving standard, but to evolve into an add-on that offers additional features and benefits that HTML 5 does not (improved image quality, ability to work over limited bandwidth connections/interoperability with mobile devices, “push” feature to drive content such as sports scores, ability to download content in the background while the user is working on something else, etc). But however Adobe decides to approach it, it would be wise to observe the lessons from history.