JD on EP

I've been handling Player/Linux requests for years, but this cycle feels quite different... the gap between Mac/Win and Linux is similar, about six months across versions, but there's a lot more attention on this Flash Player 9 cycle. In part that's because we're jumping straight from Player 7 to Player 9 (due to the short lifetime of the graphics-enhanced Flash Player 8). But previous versions did not have even a fiftieth of the volume of requests that we're seeing this time.

(a) The pull of great content is very significant.

The video sites make a big difference this time. People using Linux boxes are not yet able to access YouTube, Google Video, all the other sites which became popular over the past year.

But we're also seeing websites move to new Player versions far more quickly than before. Flash Player 8 was released in September 2005, yet many large sites require this or FP9 already. If you check the historical adoption then Flash Player 5 hit 80% consumer viewability in about a year-and-a-half... FP6 took just over a year, FP7 just under a year... Flash Player 8 reached 86% consumer viewability in about nine months. The acceleration has continued, and major websites have taken advantage of this.

First the high Mac/Win adoption rates pulled content creators along, and now the content creators are pulling the minority viewers along... there's more pressure now, earlier, for Linux ports than before. The content plays a key role in this whole dynamic.

(b) Video helps application developers in subtle ways.

If you look at the above info from a slightly different angle, the increase in content sites requiring new video codecs provides a substantial benefit to Flex developers. It is now part of the social fabric for people to update their computers' Flash abilities. The popular sites may be requesting upgrades for video content, but every Mac/Win Player download since the end of June has also included the new ActionScript 3 Virtual Machine, required for Flex 2 work.

Great content sites are not only pulling along the less common computing environments, they're also pushing the audience along into the ability to handle smarter and more graceful interfaces done in Flex. You may not use video in your own Flex work, but the video sites are making it easier to seamlessly deploy your Flex work.

(And if you use the visual authoring environment of Flash Professional 8, then the ActionScript 3 Preview lets you take advantage of that enhanced processing power today.)

(c) Open betas may not be the most efficient style of beta.

The comments to Mike's blog pretty clearly show the benefits of using a smaller beta pool, with testers who have stronger info-processing ability. It's nearly impossible to read all the comments there already, much less turn them into functional messages... it's a paradox that an increase in otherwise well-meaning writers who don't read each other can end up producing less actual communication. I suspect many of these requests are driven by the desire to avoid JavaScript detection routines on many popular websites, but still, to read each one, and to try to turn each into an actionable item... much more effective to have a smaller pool of people writing better reports, would get us to an actual release date faster.