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Analysis: Who Benefits Most From the Chrome-Flash Collaboration?

Posted on 30. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in Features

We all thought it was dead; in one fell swoop its back on the map.

It was rumored yesterday that Google and Adobe would work together to integrate Flash into the Chrome browser, and that rumor indeed came true. Now the development version of Chrome is capable of having Flash baked in, if you so choose. At some point in the near future, this will be implemented to all versions of Chrome. I think many are surprised by the move here, but at the same time this was decision that must have been was months in the making as Google becomes more of an adversary to Apple.

What happens here is a lesson of competitive advantage: Google plans on having a big share of the mobile market since they have watched what Apple has been able to accomplish with wireless phones and the hype over the iPad. So creating a strategic partnership with Mozilla and Adobe makes sense. Sure, Flash is not open source but it would not surprise me that there is some sort of agreement between Google and Adobe to start heading that way with Flash, seeing as how Google supports it with Chrome, Android, Chrome OS and other projects.

So Google gets a competitive advantage over Apple. What does Adobe gain? Well, in the future, everyone who uses Chrome will get Flash installed. Since most browsers today have it installed anyways, a logical step is to integrate it. Plus, most people don’t spend time updating Flash unless thye need to for running something in their browser that needs it, and that leaves users vulnerable to attack since older versions are more susceptible than the latest and greatest.

An auto-update allows users to be worry-free when it comes to Flash. Because most people don’t really care about Flash itself, they just want the interactive web to work as it should, right?

It’s been said that Adobe has struggled to keep Flash from being exploited, most likely due to the fact that before now Flash wasn’t a target of hackers. That’s no longer the case and it makes one wonder how this will affect Adobe’s other popular free software, Reader, which uses rather large PDF file formats that could contain malicious code.

So who gains the most? While Google getting a standard format integrated into Chrome is certainly a plus, it does make one wonder whatever happened to the huge push to HTML5, where video codecs are browser embedded and can play clips using a tag. Perhaps this is a reaction to the metrics recorded from the YouTube HTML5 beta, with Google realizing that Flash is so ubiquitous it is better off increasing support of the format that powers the biggest and potentially most profitable video site in the world.

Adobe gets exposure for their formats as a result of this, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone now that a seemingly resurrected Flash will allow them to continue to provide all sorts of web content to end users. They get the backing of Google which will challenge Steve Jobs’ assertion that Flash is full of bugs, and allow for a more secure experience because security sandboxing will be implemented. Not to mention the fact that auto-update will limit the amount of widespread attack that could possible. This could potentially motivate hackers to take on different, and perhaps more exploitable, targets that exist.

So for now Google wins, until we see Flash integrated in all the major browsers – which could be the next move since Mozilla also has an interest in this new collaboration.

Tags: Adobe, Adobe Reader, android, apple, Flash, HTML5, iPad, Mozilla, PDF, Steve Jobs, YouTube