No Flash For Windows Phone 7.. Shocking

One point I was curious about among the tidbits regarding the release of Windows Phone 7 is what kind of support Flash will receive. Adobe and Google have been hiding in dark corners together, murmuring about how best to deal with Apple’s threat to both of their business models, but where does Microsoft stand on all that? Turns out Windows Phone 7 contains absolutely no Flash support whatsoever. Microsoft’s Andy Lees, president of the mobile communications division spoke out about Flash on WP7, and insisted it wasn’t a “religious thing”. “It’s not a religious thing; we support standard H.264 video in the browser. We’re not allergic to Flash, we’re not allergic to Silverlight, we’re not allergic to HTML5 – but this [Windows Phone 7 browser] doesn’t support it,” he said. Apparently, the browser built into WP7 is equivalent to technology existing somewhere between IE7 and IE8. Lees is confident that the future of the web will not be plugins, and used Active-X as an example of how their phone strategy differs to their desktop strategy. Silverlight too is currently missing on WP7, a sure sign that Microsoft is willing to eat it’s own dog food on this issue. Microsoft is keeping quiet on the future of WP7, and rightly so – perhaps they’re finally learning from Apple’s victories.