I don’t know how I missed this.  I’ve been reading Bob Cringely’s column at pbs.org for the past 10 years or so, and I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it.  Bob was one of the first people to embrace “Geek” culture. His book “Accidental Empires” is a must-read for anyone interested in the computer industry, as is watching his documentary “Truimph Of The Nerds”.  However, Cringely also tends to focus on the “winners” only, and his histories  gloss over great innovators and technologies that did not end-up, in hindsight, to win the day.   For instance, the Atari/Commodore Home computer wars probably influenced computers and the home computer industry as much as anything else in the 80’s, yet I’ve never seen him write one word about it.  Ditto for the effect games have had on the industry.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago Bob finally wrote about something near and dear to my heart: Flash.  In this column “An Air Of Invisibility”  Cingley points out that Flash’s “invisibility” (the fact that it has gone past ubiquitous and now just expected) puts Adobe in a very good position to fight-off things like Microsoft Silverlight and Java FX.   I could not agree more.  

Check out the article over at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070629_002360.html