There has been lots of chatter among the pundits out there that there is a critical mass being reached against the use of Adobe's Flash. There are two very different sides of the argument, but the facts are obvious. The heart of the matter being the public 'leaking' of statements from that are supposedly from the mouth of Apple's Steve Jobs about his disdain for Flash and giving some firm implication that it will not be finding its way into iPhone OS any time remotely soon. This prompted individuals from Adobe to return salvo that Flash is a wonderful, enabling technology and Apple and its users are missing out by leaving support out of the platform. Regardless of the technical arguments for or against Flash, this article is more about the path from here and not a debate about using Flash vs. HTML5 or whatever rich-media language.

What was true in the pre-iPhone world is no longer true. That can be a bit overdramatic but what has changed is that we went from a world where all of the major browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) on all the major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux) could install a Flash plugin and view Flash content. With the introduction of one platform that outright refuses to support Flash and can do so because of its closed source nature, the game has been changed. Now, with the iPhone OS being the hold-out, not all major platforms support Flash.

What happens from here is one of two things and the action will come from one very large group, web content creators.

1) They choose to ignore iPhone OS users and continue writing web pages that include Flash content.
2) They choose to use technology that is the "lowest common denominator" and write web pages that do not include Flash content.

If you're a web developer today, you are going to take one of those two routes. There will be little flip-flopping around and after a short feeling out period, of which we are in right now, there will be big momentum behind one of two. If the iPhone OS platform were small and niche, as it was in 2007, prior to the SDK release, then it wouldn't be by definition major and this wouldn't be an issue but since the iPhone has exploded into popularity, the rules have changed.

This period before the iPad launch has made Adobe, Apple and the web developer community do some pre-fight posturing. Everybody is waiting for the main event and the remaining amount of 2010 after the iPad launch will be critical for all involved. Adobe's downside is far larger than Apple's who is still selling devices left and right with the status quo. The momentum right now is clearly on the side of Apple who with every device sold introduce another device into the wild that doesn't support Flash, lessen its ubiquity and another pebble on the scale of why you shouldn't use Flash.

As has been said by others, all you need is one to make unanimous into not. Flash support (or not but easily corrected by a plugin) can no longer be assumed. The march towards "anti-critical mass" has begun.