Friday, May 14, 2010

Salesforce.com and this whole Flash vs Apple thing

Now I get why Salesforce wanted Steve Gillmor and why he wanted them. If you judge from the commentary on the company’s Cloudblog, some crazy bright people work there. The blog’s subtitle is “An industry view with altitude,” and some of that big picture thinking comes from knowing industry history, and some of that historical knowledge comes from the grey hairs you see in the contributor photos. As a fellow greyhair, I like that.

Currently playing on the blog: one Flash post after another. I’m an iPad owner with just a two-week tenure (waited for the 3G), so I’ve been following this whole Flash-Apple thing—dubious two months ago, warming up, surprised to be so persuaded by Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash, yet still worried about non-video Flash. The “Well, you have H.264” argument doesn’t answer a concern for a few important applications of Flash.

Worried about what non-video Flash? Most of it I couldn’t care less about: HBO’s new all-Flash site, car dealer sites, Flash banner ads, maybe even widget platforms and embedded audio plugins. I do wonder how quickly other methods can replace e-learning courses and demonstrations like the nice stuff The New York Times makes to illuminate its stories. But especially e-learning, a market expected to reach $50 billion by 2014, as big as the market for home improvement for energy savings, though you don’t hear much about it from web/tech luminaries, let alone in presidential speeches.

I’m not deep in the online training game, but have some connection to it. As far as I’ve been able to determine in my world, nobody’s planning to make courses any other way. There might be an opportunity here for a company to really clean up with some type of vector something or other. In HTML5 canvas? I haven’t looked into which technologies are out there poised to replace what Flash can do. I figure e-learning types could be watching casual gaming programmers and follow their lead, but I don’t think most of them are. Even if they did pick up on methods used in gaming, it seems like it would have to take another few years before content authoring tools for non-programmers could become available.

Salesforce itself must expect status quo at least for a while. As I was reading the second post on the current blog index I wondered if the company did any online training, so I nosed around the site and spotted a recruitment ad for curriculum developer for Force.com. Rapid deployment software experience desired: Articulate Studio, Captivate, Camtasia—all Flash-based.

We may be entering a rather painful interregnum and I have to say it’s all very interesting. God, I love change.