The year Flash lost the mobile war: a look back at 2011's top IT stories
20.05.12
2011 was a year of upheaval in IT, with Flash losing the mobile war to HTML5, RSA succumbing to a hack leaving SecurID products exposed, HP and RIM making big mistakes in core markets, cloud services taking off (while suffering some outages), and more rapid browser release cycles making life difficult for the enterprise. Here's a recap of the year's top stories in IT.
Flash loses mobile war to HTML5
When Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote his " Thoughts on Flash " open letter in April 2010, it was not yet clear that Adobe Flash would lose the war for mobile video. But with Apple's refusal to support Flash on the iPad and iPhone, consistent performance issues on mobile devices, and an increasingly industry-wide move toward HTML5, Adobe gave up in November of this year and gutted its mobile Flash player strategy . Layoffs were paired with a halt to development of Flash Player for mobile browsers, with mobile Flash support limited to critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. HTML5 will face trials and tribulations in the post-Flash era , but with Adobe admitting the game is up and throwing its support behind HTML5, the world now seems to be moving in one direction.
Source: Ars Technica