The bottom line is that regardless of wether you like flash or not it is on 98% of the computers out there and it cannot be ignored by a device that pesumes to be the ultimate web browser.
Let’s analize html 5 which seems to be the altermative apple is putting forward. It is an unfinished standard!!!! Not only that but it is not being implemented across browsers the same way. Firefox supports only the ogg video format on the video element. Everybody else does h.264, and older browsers dont have support for html 5 period. On top of that, the world’s largest browser (ie) does not currently support html5. So if you wanted to provide a video experience for the users of your site you would have to encode your video as ogg and h.264. You would then also need to fallback to flash for the majority of your users.
So going back to the original question, will apple be hurt by their decision….. in my opinion, NO.
We the web developers are the ones really hurt by this. Apple and Adobe can afford to live in the clouds but us web devs that are here in the trenches still need to create sites that can operate in the real world.
