Big news today: Adobe is opening up the Flash platform for their new “Open Screen Project“. You know they’re serious because they’re giving up $50 million of annual revenue (see item #4 below).

In geek-speak summary, here’s what Adobe’s doing:

1. Allowing outside developers to access the guts of the SWF and FLV/F4V viedo specs. This will allow 3rd parties to build customized Flash components and new apps that will interface with Flash.
2. Publishing the APIs that will allow outside developers to port Flash to new platforms
3. Publishing Adobe’s protocols (FlashCast and AMF) for pushing data & applications to mobile devices (and other devices)
4. Removing licensing fees for mobile device Flash players

This marks another phase in the iPhone / Flash battle for web standards dominance. Adobe’s leveraging it’s market position to entrench as widely as possible, while Apple strong-arms them off the iPhone platform in order to strengthen open-standards AJAX web apps (and their own XCode iPhone apps).

And where’s SilverLight in all this? Nowhere to be found… it looks like Microsoft is getting its butt kicked by TWO dominant platforms. Your new technology platform doesn’t stand a chance when your competition has a lock on the existing users, developers, and applications. Oh, the irony….

Filed under: strategy, video