Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Demos
By Harry McCracken | Tuesday, May 11, 2010 at 9:34 pm
On Friday, Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart demoed FlashPlayer 10.1 for Android at a Seattle conference. It crashed repeatedly and couldn’t deal with one site (Hulu) that an audience member asked to see. Given Flash’s already-shaky reputation at the moment, it wasn’t surprising that this led to some withering comments.
Stewart has published a sheepish blog post saying he was using an interim build of the software that wasn’t up to the stress test of a public demo. The post includes an embedded video of Stewart demoing several Flash sites on a Nexus One phone. And it…works. Quite well.
Here it is:
Me, I wasn’t that alarmed over Stewart’s Friday fiasco, nor am I all that swayed by his rebound. Having sat through thousands of tech demos over the past couple of decades, I’ve come to the conclusion that any correlation between the quality of a demo and the quality of a product is tenuous at best. I’ve seen products that knocked my socks off when demoed in a controlled environment, and which barely worked at all when they shipped. (A wise editor I once worked for told me to be especially skeptical about demos performed by the person who designed the product–in some cases that person is about the only one who can make a product sing.)
Bad demos are no more definitive than good ones: I’ve seen products that turned out to be entirely praiseworthy crash, spawn error messages, and otherwise misbehave. (There are, of course, two types of crashes: Those suffered by shipping products, and those that occur with beta products. The former are never a good sign; the latter are nothing to panic over. If a program didn’t crash, it probably wouldn’t be in beta.)
Here’s one piece of news I know is good: Adobe says it’s going to have a beta of FlashPlayer 10.0 for Android ready for Google’s I|O developer conference next week. Anyone who gets his or her hands on it will be in a far better position to have opinions about mobile Flash than anyone who hasn’t…
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Storytelling Social Media Marketing PR Business & Technology Curated Stories May 12, 2010 Says:
May 12th, 2010 at 1:49 pm[…] Three Kinds of Lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Demos Published: May 11, 2010 Source: Technologizer On Friday, Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart demoed FlashPlayer 10.1 for Android at a Seattle conference. It crashed repeatedly and couldn’t deal with one site (Hulu) that an audience member asked to see. Given F… […]
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May 13th, 2010 at 10:20 am[…] week, it plans to release a beta of FlashPlayer 10.1 for Android to coincide with Google’s I|O developer conference. For the first time, real […]
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May 23rd, 2010 at 2:25 am[…] In Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart’s recent video, he singled out this Japanese site as one of his favorite Flash creations, both in desktop browsers […]
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December 31st, 2010 at 12:36 pm[…] a bad Adobe demo of mobile Flash, I said that demos–be they lousy or terrific–don’t mean […]
May 11th, 2010 at 9:54 pm
thank for this info, 2t 4u
May 12th, 2010 at 7:20 am
Yes, but given all the whining we’ve heard from Adobe in the last six months, when they finally have a chance to show how great Flash on mobile is, it had better be fantastic. Especially, because they’ve been claiming that Flash on mobile is going to be great since the iPhone was introduced three years ago.
Now they’ve added a perception problem to the real problem of getting Flash on mobile devices, especially when Apple will have over 100 million Flash-less devices in the wild by the end of the year.
May 12th, 2010 at 7:39 am
Flash is dead. Get over it.
May 12th, 2010 at 8:45 am
An additional problem is the hardware requirements. If flash only works on Nexus One level hardware or better, they’ve basically made Apple’s point.
In addition, with respect to your demos, I agree. When I’ve done demos, I’ve gone off the beaten path so I could show fearlessness.
However, this guy still did a demo, albeit *more controlled* than his live appears. I wouldn’t be convinced until the thing hit the wild and you could try it for more than 3 second snippets.
And ultimately, best case, this is only available for that version of Android not the wide array of mobile devices out there.
May 13th, 2010 at 1:15 am
Simply amazing, on a demo it bombed but in his blog (a controlled environment) it worked,