Corporate chest-beating
One company that seems certain to push hard for HTML 5 is Apple. Jodoin reckoned a lot of the aggro between Adobe and Apple is ego-related - hardly surprising. With so much of the interplay that goes on between the big tech companies, much of what makes its way into the public domain is a combination of brinkmanship and chest-beating.
What else could explain the apparent cooperation between Apple and Google, who seem determined to take each other on in so many other areas? The one thing they both probably have in common in this case is a desire to unleash their huge software development resources on producing sexy web apps without having to go through a third part in order to do so.
This is bound to be a limiting factor for the other would-be player in the web video and animation platform game - Microsoft. It has Silverlight, which is considered by many to be a preferable platform to Flash. The problem is is has neither the inertia of Flash, nor the Apple and Google support of HTML 5.
However, as the only company that makes the operating system, the cloud services, the browser and the rich media platform, Microsoft has the potential to do something pretty special with Windows Phone 7 when it comes out. If it can enable sexy UIs and applications, and seamlessly sync with the cloud and with PCs, it could not only give Silverlight a strong USP, it could also render talk of full Windows not running on the ARM instruction set redundant.
So while Adobe certainly has inertia on its side with Flash, there are a hell of a lot of alternatives coming through. Google has recently shown its support for HTML 5 by launching a version of YouTube using it, and we can expect Apple to keep exploring alternatives. Adobe has better raise its game, and soon, if it doesn't want to get left behind in the great mobile Internet land-grab.
