The Time I Nearly Killed Flash
Macromedia was a happening place to work in 1999. We had Shockwave, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and of course the little web vector graphics tool that could: Flash. Flash made Web 1.0 jump off the page with edgy animations and insanely cool graphics that spun around, synched to sound and generally blew your turn-of-the-century mind.
Just about every personal computer on the planet had a pre-installed or downloaded version of Flash Player. Apple couldn’t get traction for QuickTime, but Flash’s numbers were absolutely gaudy: 100 million downloads, 200 million downloads. We were bigger than the Beatles.
Flash made websites sing at the exact time a generation of capitalists were trying to sell stuff on the Web — or more specifically — sell the financial markets on the idea that they could sell stuff on the Web. Kozmo, Boo.com and scores of others dressed their value proposition in fancy web graphics, bells and whistles. Flash provided heart-stopping CGI to distract from underdeveloped characters and questionable scripts.
This was the first tech boom of the modern era and this one wasn’t all about the engineers. You needed PR hustlers to get coverage and mind share with industry analysts, tech press and anyone regularly quoted on C/Net or in the Red Herring. On a typical Thursday night our engineering team wouldn’t be holding court at a shared workspace mixer. They’d be coding and I’d be heading to the rooftop party at the Industry Standard to do business.
In addition to showing up on the pages of Upside, ZD-Net or one of the many other tech media outlets of the day, it was also critically important that a company maintain it’s cool. As later outcomes would prove, this first dot com economy relied on hype and attitude. You couldn’t let them see you sweat.
At Macromedia we maintained the coolest of attitudes at all times but we also had one eye on the adults over at Adobe. They had Illustrator and Photoshop, the two dominant products in the print design world. Adobe also had a pile of money and a need to migrate that dominance to the Web, where Flash was king.
As PR Manager for Flash I was at the tip of the spear. I had a comprehensive response plan ready to be deployed the moment Adobe announced its Flash killer. I had a short list of influential Flash design houses ready to comment, analysts on speed dial and of course, a press release.
The press release included quotes from our CEO blasting Adobe Product X and stating this new offering was inferior. Of course we hadn’t seen the competition, but we could only assume.
I accidentally sent the release to a reporter at C/Net when I was pitching another initiative. This was the blunder of a professional lifetime. The tech press were hungry for any morsel about the Adobe/Macromedia rivalry and this paranoid-looking press release would have made an excellent story. We’d be a laughing stock — the cool kids unmasked as bed wetters.
Our CEO had Steve Jobs-like empathy and a similar tolerance for incompetence. I’d certainly be fired but I knew it could be much worse. I’d probably end up like the Cubs fan who interfered with the ball and cost his team the chance to win it all. My professional legacy and tombstone epitaph had been handled in one fell swoop.
Now every fiber of my being, every ounce of my professional skill, every ancient instinct from my Irish forefathers was focused on my tone of voice for a desperate phone call to a reporter I did not know. Would she please delete the press release I just sent — it was sent in error. She told me to hang on while she pulled it up. There was a long pause. Then she said, “no problem, I will do that.”
In reality, it is doubtful that my blunder would have harmed Flash in a material way. The pull of the product was too strong. But The Force would have been interrupted, and that’s never a good thing.
Of course Adobe did announce their Flash killer. It was a dud. Eventually the crash of 2000 took down everyone and took the fun out of everything. If you can’t beat em, join em. Adobe picked up Macromedia in 2005.
So it wasn’t a two-bit junior PR guy who killed Flash after all. Sadly, the current threat to Flash centers on security concerns. How very dour and sobering and 2015. I’d rather be sipping a cocktail in 1999 talking up the merits of a Skip Intro Flash animation with young tech journalists as drunk on the scene as I was.
God Bless the one who acted as a human being first, journalist second, and saved my ass. I don’t even remember her name. It wasn’t Kara Swisher — but she will always be the Kara Swisher of my heart.
As Andy told Red “If you’ve come this far, maybe you’re willing to come a little further.” Thank you so much for reading this story. If you hit Recommend below it means more people will read this. I would be so honored and grateful if you would follow me on Medium by clicking the button near my name. Having an audience is every frustrated writer’s dream. Have a great day.
