Techies just love to rag on Flash. Their claims that Flash player causes crashes are dubious at best, I still suspect their biggest problem with it boils down to one thing: they don't like working in Flash. People have a strong tendency to hate what they aren't good at.

But Flash isn't dead, not even close. The thing about those tech articles is that they're written by techies, who are on the cutting edge. Most people are not, and here's the proof: Even though usage of the IE 6 browser has finally dropped below 1%, a third of the people online are still using some version of IE*. So a third of users didn't even care enough to upgrade to a better browser. Average users simply don't care on the same level that experts do.

So if techies don't like Flash because it makes them feel dumb, and most users don't mind it, why is it disappearing from mobile devices? Well, first Apple got into a major power battle with Adobe. As long as Apple was doing it, the other mobile makers realized they could follow suit and still compete. These are techies making the decisions on this, after all.

But the thing is, Flash isn't really needed on mobile devices. There might be some potential use for it, but people do still use desktop PCs plenty. Case in point: Ford's website has a great build-a-car interface that uses Flash player. They don't need to worry about it functioning on a mobile device because no one is going to shop for a car on a 4 inch screen. Even a tablet is on the small side for that. When I'm looking at cars online, I'm going to use the largest screen I have available, which means using my PC.

Oh, but we're switching to HTML5, we don't need Flash any more! Right. There's still browser-compatibility issues with HTML5, especially older browsers. Remember that bit about people not upgrading their browsers? Exactly. So, sure, eventually we'll move to that, but we sure as hell aren't all the way there yet. Not even close.

Seriously, that Ford build-a-car thing is fun, you should try it. I don't endorse Ford, frankly I don't like them. But I am sorely tempted to want that Shelby convertible now. And since that was the entire point of the Flash interface there, I'd say it's a big success.

*The statistics vary depending on the source, but the overall average is around one third.