The 0-Guard

Last week I was reading an excellent article by Bill Simmons on the "true" trade value of NBA players. While talking about likely rookie-of-the-year Tyreke Evans, Simmons dubbed him 0-guard. I thought that this was quite clever, and several other players immediately came to mind. Simmons went on to list three other players as 0-guards: Gilbert Arenas, Dwayne Wade, and Brandon Roy. I thought of some others. Here are what I would call the defining characteristics of the 0-guard:

1.) They must have the ball in their hands. These are players who generally useless on offense without the ball. They are not good spot-up shooters. They aren't going to move well without the ball to get open or get teammates open. They generally look lost in a half-court offense if the ball is not in their hands at all times.

2.) They are not good passers. Now many 0-guards rack up a lot of assists. However that is just because the ball is always in their hands. The only way they pass the ball is if the defense is all over them and teammates are wide open, hence the assists. However, they don't always do this very effectively. For example, in his best years Arenas averaged 6 assists/game, but also 3.5 turnovers/game while averaging 21 shots/game and 10 free throw attempts/game. Last year, Dwayne Wade averaged 7.5 assists/game, but that came with 5 turnovers/game, while taking 22 shots and 10 free throws per game.

3.) They can get their shot -- easily. This kind of goes without saying. All of these guys are effective at creating for themselves/getting open off the dribble, around screens, etc. If they couldn't do this, they would not be playing at all. Often they are spectacularly good at this -- Dwayne Wade for example.

These are the three obvious 0-guard characteristics. However, there are some other more subtle shared characteristics.

4.) They are poor rebounders. These guys want to get out in transition, so they do not hit the defensive glass and they make no attempts to box out anyone.

5.) They are defensive liabilities. Sort of a continuation from #4. All of their energy goes into scoring, not much is left for defense. Now some guys may average a lot of steals, but that is a notoriously misleading statistic when it comes to defense.

6.) Point guard size. Maybe this helps to explain #5 and #4, but these guys generally don't have the size to match up against shooting guards. This does not necessarily imply being short -- Wade is 6-4 and Evans is 6-6.

Given the above, I don't think Brandon Roy belongs on the list. For his career he has averaged 5 assists but only 2 turnovers per game, while taking 16 shots and 6 free throw attempts per game. That does not sound like a guy who has to have the ball in hand -- or maybe I'm wrong and he's just not a very good 0-guard. I think Simmons put him on the list because Roy demands the ball in his hands at the end of games.

There are some other obvious guys who belong on this list. Starting locally, Monta Ellis is definitely a 0-guard. This year he has averaged 5 assists / 4 turnovers per game, while taking 22 shots and 6 free throw attempts per game. This is definitely Arenas/Wade country. Brandon Jennings is borderline. So is Derrick Rose, but in both cases these guys are young enough to "grow out of it." Rodney Stuckey is a 0-guard, but not a very good one. Jason Terry also qualifies, but he doesn't realize it. He thinks he can spot-up and shoot, but he can't. 

Finally, I think Bill Simmons got it wrong when he said that Gilbert Arenas invented the 0-guard position. To me, the quintessential and original 0-guard was Allen Iverson. He had a season (01-02) where he averaged 5.5 assists / 4.0 turnovers to go with 28 shots and 10 free throw attempts per game! Now late in his career, he did become a better passer, but was still more of a 0-guard than a point guard.

eBay Mobile for Android

I have been working on mobile at eBay since the fall of 2008. Almost immediately upon joining the team, I started running my mouth about how we needed to create an Android application. At the time, the G1 had just come out, and let's be honest. It was definitely a cut below the iPhone -- the standard that all phones are measured against whether they like it or not. The development environment was attractive, but we had to be pragmatic about things. eBay Mobile for iPhone was a big hit, and we had tons of ides for improving it. So Android had to wait. Yesterday, the wait was over and eBay Mobile for Android became available for download from the Android Market. It requires Android 1.6, and we have not rolled it out in all of the countries that our iPhone app is available in, so depending on your device and your location, it may not yet show up in the Market. If you're on 1.6, just be patient, hopefully we'll be in your country soon. If you're on 1.0/1.1/1.5... well your carrier needs to upgrade you to 1.6 :-)

The app was the result of a lot of hard work by some very talented engineers. If you have an Android phone, then of course I am hoping you will go try it out. One of the cool features of the Android platform that we took advantage of is integration with the system level QuickSearch. This makes it possible for popular search terms on eBay to be automatically suggested to you as type in the QuickSearch box on the home screen of your phone. However, this is one of those kind of curious features in Android. It is relatively easy to do (though making it fast, for something dynamic like popular search terms on eBay, can be tricky -- our engineers did an awesome job on this), but it is not something that you can "enable" by default. What I mean is that any application can become a provider for the QuickSearch box, but the applications cannot get their suggestions to automatically appear. Instead the user must manually enable add the provider, and this is not the most obvious thing to do. To give you an idea, I did a short video that shows you how to do this:

See what I mean? It's hard to expect that most users will figure this out on their own. Maybe we could put some kind of message in the app instructing them how to do this, but it is not something you can really describe succinctly. Anyways, as you see in the video, one you add eBay to your list of search providers, the results from eBay will only appear at the bottom of the list of suggestions. Once again, it would be very easy for a user to not even know that they are there. If they scroll down and find them, and do this a few times, then supposedly Android is smart and starts putting the eBay results closer to the top of the list...

I think this is something that Android could definitely improve on, since I think it is a great idea to allow other apps to hook into the "global" search if you will. I can definitely imagine the Facebook app and various Twitter apps doing this too. However, one could understand if apps did not do this, given how difficult it is for an apps' contributions to surface in the search suggestions.

Nexus One vs. iPhone

I recently purchased a Nexus One, primarily for Android development. I needed a device for developing Android 2.0+ on. The 2.0 SDK has been out for almost three months now, and yet it is still not available for my old developer phone, the Android Dev Phone One. I had gotten pessimistic about HTC making Android 2.1 (since apparently 2.0 is being skipped) for the ADP1, which is essentially the G1, so it was time to buy a new phone for development. I decided to spend some quality time with the phone, i.e. as a user, not a developer, and share my thoughts.

First, a caveat... I plopped in my AT&T SIM card into the N1 before turning it on. That worked just fine -- with some known limitations. By working just fine, I mean that the N1 recognized the SIM card and configured itself for AT&T's APN without me doing anything. This was not the case with the ADP1, which was actually a pain to get working initially. You see, every Android phone that I have used wants you to sign in to Google before doing anything else. This can be a real problem if it cannot use the SIM card to access a data network. Anyways, it was no problem at all for the N1. However, as Google has pointed out, the N1 is not able to access AT&T's 3G network. It does not have the right radio for this. I have no idea why this is the case, but I will say this. Let's just imagine that I loved the N1 so much, that I decided that I wanted it to be my everyday phone instead of my iPhone. Even if that was the case, there is no way I would do this, since I would have to switch service to T-Mobile in order to access a 3G network on the G1, and for me (as well as most iPhone users) that would meaning breaking my contract with AT&T. On the other hand, if Google/HTC had only put the right radio in the N1, so that it could access AT&T's 3G network, then that would not be an issue. I bring all of this up now, because it does make it more difficult to compare the two phones. If you have one phone that is on 3G and another on Edge, you will prefer the 3G one unless the Edge phone is just way better in every other way.

Ok, so the good news is that the N1 is definitely a phone that I could live with. It is fast, I mean really fast. Navigating between applications, applications execution, startup, etc. are all very fast on this phone. I would say it is noticeably faster than my iPhone 3GS. In fact, I did some mini-benchmarking between the eBay Mobile app for the iPhone and our new eBay Mobile app for Android, running on the 3GS and N1 respectively. I put both phones on the same Wi-Fi network for this test. The N1 app was definitely faster than the 3GS app. Now the code is different, as our Android app takes advantage of some the Android features to speed up some common things in the app. Still, the Android app is running in an interpreted environment, the Dalvik VM, not as native code like the iPhone app. So even though it was definitely an apples to oranges comparison, I still found it relevant. Our app on the ADP1 (Android 1.6) was much slower.

The phone is also aesthetically pleasing. It is a pleasure to use. It looks nice. It is incredibly thin. In fact, the iPhone feels very chunky in my hand, after using the N1. Using the phone was very intuitive, but of course I have been using Android phones for over a year now, so I am certainly used to the OS. As a phone, it is on par with the 3GS, which is to say it is ok, nothing to brag about. The soft keyboard is easy to use for me, probably because I am used to using an iPhone. The word suggestions on Android are really nice, and it took me no time to start using them aggressively, thus saving myself a lot of typing.

My favorite part about the phone is the email. We use MS Exchange at work, and I am a long time GMail user for my personal email. With the N1, I could setup both to be in a push mode. On my iPhone, I can only setup one or the other to be in push. So on my iPhone, I have to check my mail to know if I have new GMail, but I immediately know about it on the N1. Also, I think email for both of my accounts looks better on the N1.

However, this brings me to a negative for the N1. It will connect to our MS Exchange server with no problems and can sync both email and contacts from Exchange, but not calendar. I have been told that this should be possible, but all solutions I have seen involved either 3rd party software, or using a workaround like syncing my Exchange calendar to a Google calendar first, and then syncing the Google calendar to the N1. I don't want workarounds, I just want something that works easily, so this is a huge negative for me. When I am at work, I often go from one meeting to another, and it is invaluable for me to be able to look at my phone to know when/where my next meeting is.

Speaking of apps, the Android Market is growing rapidly. The Facebook app for Android is very nice, and its use of the OS to allow you to integrate your friends list with your address book on the N1 is excellent. There are a lot of Twitter apps for the N1, I personally liked Swift. There are a lot of other quality apps out there as well. Here is a handy equivalency table of apps between iPhone/Android from Alex Payne. Still, this is definitely an area where the iPhone has a huge advantage. For me, the advantage is most pronounced for games. There are so many more games on the iPhone, with more well known titles (often backed by big companies like EA.) Also, the games seem to be much higher quality. The number/quality of titles will likely improve over time. Hopefully the quality of the games will too. Perhaps this is an area where the Dalvik VM gets in the way, though you can certainly go native for games, potentially reusing code developed for the iPhone.

A couple of more things, both good and bad... The browser on the N1 is excellent, definitely on par with the iPhone's. That is both from a user perspective and a developer perspective. Having multi-touch in the browser makes a huge difference for users. Adopting HTML 5 standards makes a big difference for developers. I never saw any pages that rendered noticeably differently on the N1 than they did on my 3GS. Usually it was the same only faster. Overall the browser, like most other things, tend to look better on the N1 than the 3GS simply because the screen is so much better... On the downside, the camera was a little more inconsistent for me on the N1. There have been times where I took pictures on it that came out completely out of focus. They certainly did not look out of focus when I took the picture. Maybe this is bad luck. The N1 has a 5MP camera, but I would not say that rates it above the 3GS. Don't get fooled the megapixel myth. I think pictures on both cameras were of similar quality -- except when the N1 would get things out of focus. The flash on the N1 seems useful however.

So there it is. If I lost both of my phones and AT&T cancelled my contract, it would actually be a tough decision between the 3GS and the N1. I would go with the 3GS because of the calendar issue and its big advantage in number of apps/games available for it. The calendar issue seems like an easy issue to address, and the apps/games discrepancy is become less pronounced. It's not like the Android Market needs to have parity with the App Store, at least not in terms of quantity. Also my issues are far from universal. So I could definitely see a lot of people picking the N1 over the 3GS.

The Anti-Netbook

For Christmas this year, I bought my kids (ages 4 and 5) their first computer: an Acer Revo. I call this the anti-netbook, but it actually shares a lot of things with a netbook. First is its processor, an Intel Atom clock in at 1.6 GHz. This helps to make for an incredibly small form factor, especially for a desktop computer. It has a 160 GB hard drive, but no optical drive.

When I bought the computer, I had exactly one reason for it. I wanted my kids to play educational games on it. That was all. The Revo came with Windows XP installed on it, and this was perfect. I needed Windows on there to get the largest number of potential games for it. Windows 7 seems to be much less of a resource hog than Vista, but I am still wagering that XP comes with less overhead.

I had another somewhat unusual plan for the Revo. It is completely isolated. No network access, not even local intranet. This is why I call it the anti-netbook. I want no Internet on it, I only want software that I personally installed to ever run on it. It is like a miniature Battlestar Galactica. Now I know there are a lot of websites with great games for kids, but I don't need them. I can find plenty of shrink-wrapped software to buy at incredibly cheap prices. However, this did lead me to some problems with the computer.

The first problem was how to install all of this software, since I had no optical drive. I was prepared for this. I simply copied the software to a flash drive and plugged that into one of the four USB ports on the Revo. This is where I encountered my first problem. Many of these titles require the original CD to be inserted into an optical drive in order to run the game. I suppose this is an anti-piracy tactic, but it really caused me problems. For a couple of the games, I could leave the flash drive plugged in and they were happy. This did not work for most of the games.

So I bought an external optical drive that could be connected via USB. This worked perfectly well, but it does mean that to change the games, one has to generally change discs in the external drive. This is not something that I trust my kids to do yet... I had one more nasty surprise in store for me. Many, actually most games published these days require the game to connect to the Internet, either to install or to play or both. There was a PBS Kids game we bought that was like this, and it was complete fail when we tried to install on the anti-netbook. So I had to make sure to only buy games that did not explicitly list an Internet connection as a hardware requirement, which generally meant buying a lot of older games. Still I found plenty of such games to choose from.

At some point I will want my kids to be able to do more with a computer. They will need a word processor. Of course I would like to teach them both to program. I would like to get them something like Mathematic/MatLab. And of course by then, they will need a computer that is connected to the Internet. When that day arrives, I will get them a Mac -- but probably not an iPad. I will teach them the old school ways!

The Truth About Europe

Earlier this week I read yet another fascinating post by Peter-Paul Koch. In this post, @ppk takes on developers who think that developing for mobile just means developing for the iPhone. He points out that the iPhone has a small market share, in terms of number of devices being bought or in use. He tackles the obvious counter-argument that the iPhone dominates in terms of mobile Internet usage in the US. In particular he points out that the US does not matter, since Asia and Europe account for a much higher percentage of mobile users worldwide. He is completely right, but if you are a mobile web developer, these facts are completely irrelevant.

It does not matter how many mobile web users there are in North America, Asia, or Europe. This has no bearing on how you design your site or what kind of technologies you choose to adopt. All that matters are the users of your site and what kind of devices they use. There can be 100x more smartphones in Japan than in Spain, but if all of your users are in Spain, then you should not care about Symbian's market share in Japan.

For a lot of sites, it is very easy to figure out where their users are because they are not localized. If your site is focussed on Brazil, then it's a good bet that most of your users are in Brazil. For sites that are international, things get trickier. This is a problem that I have had to deal with at eBay. Fortunately my job was easier because we already had a mobile site that was setup almost ten years ago. It is designed to support all devices, from old school WAP devices all the way up to iPhones and Droids. It has a presence in all of the countries where eBay has a presence. So there I had a lot of data to use where I could say "this % of our users are using iPhones, this % are using Blackberries" etc.

Most people do not have this luxury. If you do not have a specialized site for mobile, you can still look at your server logs and figure out what mobile devices are being used to access your site. However, you should be cautious with this data. If you do not have a specialized site, chances are your main site does not work properly on a lot of devices (especially true if you use a lot of JavaScript.) So chances are your users that use those devices will not use your site from their devices. However, chances are that your site does work properly on an iPhone, even if it is far from optimized for it. So iPhone users may be over-represented in your data.  You might want to fall back to using X% of users are from A, Y% from B, and the devices breakdowns in A and B are... Now if your site relies on Flash...

Let's get back to the @ppk's post and the iPhone for a moment. He makes a nice analogy to IE6 back in the day. When doing analysis on mobile eBay traffic and our strategy for the future, I actually made a similar analogy. There is one huge difference. The iPhone's browser, Mobile Safari, has been a front-runner in adopting HTML 5 standards. If you are optimizing for the iPhone, there is a good chance that you are in fact using HTML 5 standards. In other words, optimizing for the iPhone does not mean adopting a plethora of technologies that are proprietary to Mobile Safari. It's just the opposite in fact. This is the fundamental difference between Mobile Safari today and IE6 circa 2002. That is not to say that there aren't some technologies that are unique to Mobile Safari. There are. However, those are the exception, not the norm. Most of the code that you could write for Mobile Safari that would not work on other mobile browsers is actually standardized APIs that other browsers simply have not yet implemented. So yes, you could be excluding users -- this is where you need to figure out what devices your users are using -- but you are not putting up an iPhone-only wall. You are putting up a wall, but it is a "modern device that supports web standards" wall.

On Open Floor Plans

Way back in 2006, I was working for a startup, originally called Sharefare and later renamed to Ludi Labs. When I first joined Sharefare, we had an old office space in Los Altos. It was a "traditional" office space, divided up into offices, with only two large open areas. One was the front reception, and other was a break room area. While there, we had around ten engineers. We would put 2-3 engineers per office. It worked pretty well.

After I had been at Sharefare a few months, we received another round of funding, but it came with a catch. Our board wanted us to hire a "real" CEO, since our CEO/founder was a very technical guy, not an MBA type at all. Our CEO came from Under Armour, you know the sports apparel maker. He was an east coast guy, who I'm sure we paid a ton to relocate to the Bay Area. When he arrived, we were running out of space in our little old office in Los Altos. So he decided that one of his first priorities would be getting us a new office. He had a vision for the new office -- the floor of the Wall Street stock exchange. He wanted an open floor plan that would encourage collaboration and keep everyone energized. So we moved into a brand new office (we were the first tenants) with a completely wide open space.

Now I always attributed this hubris to our CEO being an east coast guy who had never really been around engineers. You see, engineers do not work well in hectic, loud environments like the floor of the Wall Street stock exchange. A very large part of their job is thinking, and people running around making noise does not help an engineer think. Lots of other folks have written about what kind of environment does work well for engineers, so I won't go too much into it. I'm just here to tell you what does not work.

The open floor plan is complete fail. The most obvious problem is the noise. First, most companies have some non-engineers who work for them. Some of these non-engineers really need to do a lot of talking to do their job. They need to be on the phone ordering office supplies, or talking to potential business partners, or screening new hires. These people constantly generate noise. Put that in an open floor plan, and there is always noise. This is a constant drain on other folks, like engineers and designers, whose work requires them to think a lot.

The next problem is that engineers and designers, do indeed need to talk sometime as well. Sometimes this is talking about work stuff, but there is also a lot of non-work stuff that engineers talk about. Maybe they are debating closures in Java or the merits of Python vs. Ruby. You want engineers who bullshit about stuff like that. Or maybe they are just talking about the Super Bowl or Lost. There is value in this too (y'know that whole "team building" thing.) Anyways, when you are in an open environment where noise is already problem, then it really discourages this kind of engineering conversations. If you are lucky enough to need to talk to your fellow engineer when it is relatively quiet in the office, you may be reluctant to engage him/her because you want to relish the peace. If instead it is during a typically noisy time, you will ask yourself if whatever topic is really worth talking about if it means shouting over the din. Instead of encouraging collaboration, the open floor plan does the opposite.

Back to Sharefare... It did not take long for everyone to realize that the open office was not working. First, we tried to put the engineers and non-engineers at opposite ends of the office. We had a handful of real offices that were intended for execs. Instead they were kept open, so that people could use them for longer phone conversations. I personally spent a lot of time in those rooms, doing phone interviews with potential new hires. Finally, the CEO came clean and admitted that the whole thing had been a bad decision on his part. He bought everyone Bose noise canceling headphones, supposedly out of his own pocket. This was his high point of popularity with engineering. Now when you walked into the office, everyone constantly had the Bose headphones on. I think this also hurt collaboration. I know I am personally less likely to try to start a conversation with somebody with headphones on.

Anyways, that was our failed experiment. It seems like the idea has been picked up more and more in the Valley. A lot of companies are opting for this configuration. I think some do it as a cost cutting measure. You can spend a lot less on furniture with an open floor plan, and you can pack in a lot more people in a given space. Others claim that it is all about encouraging collaboration. Again, my experience is that it will do the opposite. Still others do it because they want to break away from the traditional cubicle environment. To those folks I would say: "function over form." An ugly office full of productive engineers is better than a stylish office full of miserable engineers.

It's 2010, where's my HTML5?

This morning, one of my co-workers related to me that there had been mention of HTML 5 on an NPR broadcast that he heard. He joked that this morning there were probably lots of advertisers asking their designers about using HTML 5 for their next whiz-bang ad campaign. So obviously we are still in the early part of a hype cycle on HTML 5. So what's the state of the technology and where is it heading?

In terms of pure technology, there is a lot of notable progress. Google did the right thing recently and axed Gears. They had some nice innovations in Gears that have since been rolled up into the HTML 5 standard. Now it makes perfect sense to abandon their proprietary implementation, and embrace the standard. Gears is important because it is (or was) part of Chrome. Thus there are essentially five browsers that now implement a significant subset of HTML 5: IE8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 4, Opera 10. According to the latest browser share numbers, that means that 53% of users out there are using a browser that supports a lot of cool features, like local storage and selectors. That's more than half! It's tempting to extrapolate from that, but don't get too carried away.

The #1 browser of the HTML 5 browsers, is IE8 -- which does not support a lot of the features that the other browsers support like canvas, video tag, and web workers. For those would be HTML 5 advertisers out there, you better scale back your expectations. For desktop browsers, a lot of the most compelling HTML 5 capabilities are far from being widely supported. How long until IE9 comes out? How much more of HTML 5 will it support? How long until there is high adoption of it? That's too many questions to be comfortable with. Ask me again this time next year.

However, it's fun to pretend sometimes. Let's pretend that IE 9 did come out soon and that it supported everything supported by Firefox and Chrome. Let's even pretend that Microsoft was able to awaken some of their old monopolist mojo and somehow force people to upgrade. So we have a world full of canvas. Will the next great annoying ad use this? If you read my last post on Flash hate, you probably realize the answer is no. As Terry pointed out in the comments there, the Flash authoring tools really empower designers over developers. So before we see an explosion of canvas magic, there will have to be huge strides made in tooling. Now what about video? Even in our dream world, there are issues known as codecs. There is no common video format that will run on both Firefox and Chrome right now, and who knows what Microsoft will do here (WMA FTW!) So we are going to need some technical consolidation here. Let's summarize all of the things that we need to see happen to open up the golden age of HTML 5.

1.) New version of Internet Explorer that supports much more of the HTML 5 specification.
2.) This new version of IE needs to become the dominant flavor of IE.
3.) Outstanding tooling developed to enable designers to leverage HTML 5 capabilities.
4.) Standardization on video codecs by browser vendors.

Don't get too bummed out about all of this. I actually think there is real progress happening on #1 and #3. #4 probably has to wait for #1 to happen. #2 is the most problematic. Since we're dreaming, maybe if IE 9 came out with H.264 support, Google could dramatically drop support for anything else on YouTube, and thus nudge all IE users to upgrade?

If you want to drink the HTML 5 Kool-Aid, and this is bumming you out, I'm sorry. You might feel better to know that the HTML 5 situation is significantly better on mobile devices. According to AdMob, 81% of internet usage in North America was either on iPhones or Android devices. Now, most of those Android devices are running Android 1.5 or 1.6, whose browsers (can we call it Mobile Chrome please?) still use Gears -- not HTML 5. Let's  hope that most of those are upgraded (by their carriers) to Android 2.1 soon, and then we're in business. We've got all kinds of HTML 5 goodness available to 80%+ of the users out there.

The bad news is that the mobile market is fundamentally different than the desktop (though, that may be changing.) Here mobile websites compete directly against native applications. Desktop users rarely face the question, should I use an app or a website to do XYZ? Normally XYZ dictates one or the other. So for a company, there may be a lot of cool stuff you can do with HTML 5 on a mobile browser, but there are even more cool things you can do in a native app. Not only are the native apps more powerful, they are generally easier to build because of superior tooling and cohesive architecture. Maybe JavaScript vs. Objective-C vs. Java is a matter of taste, but HTML 5 has nothing even resembling the application models presented by Cocoa and Android. Instead it has the DOM APIs in JavaScript. Now throw on the differences in tooling, and you can see why for many companies it is cheaper and easier to build an iPhone app and an Android app instead of building one HTML 5 app. That's not even considering the hypothesis that the "app store" model is more appealing to end users than the browser model.

The Flash Haters

The iPad announcement had lots of subtleties to it. One of them was that the iPad browser, presumably Safari, does not include a Flash plugin. This has lead to a lot of people from Adobe getting upset. What has amazed me through all of this, is that there is even more hate for Flash than ever before. As somebody who has done a fair amount of Flash development in my career, this has really struck me as odd. Why all of the hate for Flash?

In some ways, I can actually understand why Apple would hate Flash. The Flash plugin on OSX is nowhere near as good as the Flash plugin on Windows. Now Adobe will counter they spend a disproportionate amount of money on Flash for OSX, i.e. they spend more money per OSX user than they do per Windows user. So what? There are a lot of other technologies out there that work equally well on both Windows and OSX. Just focussing on web technologies, Firefox and Chrome on the Mac are very comparable to their Windows versions. So is the Java plugin. Some other products, like Opera and Skype, tend to trail in terms of features on OSX, but not in terms of quality. If these other companies can do this, why can't Adobe? It's obviously either lack of ability or prioritization. My guess is the latter, and hence you must expect hate from Mac users. And from Apple. So it should not be so surprising that Flash is left off the iPad, iPhone, etc. If Adobe really wanted to get Flash on those devices, an obvious first step would be to make Flash on OSX as good as Flash on Windows. That is something that Adobe can do all by themselves. Instead it seems like they would rather publicly bemoan their exclusion on the iPad. Now is there a guarantee that if they improved Flash on OSX, Apple would care? No, of course not. However, there is no way they will get on those devices without this first step, IMO.

Ok, so Mac user hate for Flash is understandable. Along the same lines, I would guess that Linux user hate is also understandable. That is, if there were actually any Linux users out there. I digress. I see a lot of hate from developers. What about that? That one is not so easy for me to understand. As a web developer, Flash has been opening doorways for me for a long time. Need to cache 30 KB of data on the client? For a long time this was impossible unless you used Flash (or maybe Java.) Need to make a cross-domain call? That is still generally impossible from the browser, unless you use Flash. Need to show 2D/3D graphs and visualizations? Again, this is still generally impossible, except through Flash. Oh and video... The only way to show a video that can be played on all of the top five web browsers (IE8, IE7, Firefox 3.5, IE6, Firefox 3.0) is to use Flash.

But, but, but, what about HTML 5? Many people think it will kill/replace/maim Flash. Apparently this list includes a certain Steve Jobs. As I have said before, I hate web standards. I mean, I love them, too. But I hate them mostly. Standards are the opposite of innovation, and perhaps its enemy. However, they are the engineer's best friend. Flash has provided a lot of innovation, that HTML 5 will simply copy and standardize. That is the best possible function of standards. However, the story is not so simple. Some things, like local storage,  are already supported by IE8, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4. This is like Flash's SharedObjects, though slightly less powerful (but good enough.) Not everything is so rosy; canvas and video playback immediately come to mind. Canvas is particularly a hot topic. You can do some amazing things with it, but it requires payment in blood. I cannot imagine what it would be like to program Farmville in JavaScript using Canvas. Maybe somebody will come up with tools for that. In fact, I would be surprised if Adobe did not do this. Of course, we still need to hope and pray that canvas is supported in IE9...

So back to the original point. Why do developers hate Flash? It certainly enables them to do more stuff in web applications. Even if that list of extra features is being shrunk by the HTML 5 monster, it's still there. So shouldn't they love it? Well, you would think so, but they don't. Here are some guesses as to why:

1. Expensive tools -- Most of the tools used by a lot of developers are free. The Flash authoring tools are far from it. That can be annoying. You have to throw down a lot of money just learn something. That's not cool.
2. Bad tools -- At least from a developer perspective. The Flash authoring tools have historically been aimed at designers. That changed with Flex Builder/Flash Builder, but the damage was done. Also, those tools were aimed more at application development, which largely seemed like a waste of Flash.
3. Back to the Mac  -- A lot of developers use Macs, and we all know about Flash on OSX...
4. Accessibility -- Unfortunately this doesn't mean much to most developers. But it should. I must admit, that a year ago I probably wouldn't have listed this. However, as I have learned more, I have learned how Flash is such a huge problem for accessibility. This is actually one area where HTML 5 really shines, with the inclusion of the ARIA standards.
5. Design envy -- This kind of goes back to #2. Flash has had all the awesome capabilities for years, but they have largely gone untapped in web applications. Maybe by playing to designers all of those years, Flash has earned enemies. Imagine a developer being asked to scope some radical web feature. They give a typically large scope for it. His manager turns around and gets a designer, a freakin' designer, to do it in half the time.

What have I missed? Why do web developers hate Flash so much?