Virgin Adds Another Brick in the Anti-Flash Wall

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When a CTO or CIO of a company grumbles about having to use a technology because they feel it’s too buggy, it’s not news. It’s just some guy grumbling about crappy technology, even if he has a deep expertise in running a corporate Web site.

But when the technology in question is Flash, and the complaining executive works for a forward-thinking and innovative company like Virgin America, it can quickly become news.

Virgin America revamped its Web site this week, and it doesn’t rely on Flash. Instead, the company’s CIO, Ravi Simhambhatla, said that HTML was “good enough” for dishing up animated content. Virgin plans to switch to HTML5 in the future.

In an interview with the Register, Simhambhatla said, “I don't want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin]."

Virgin’s move wasn’t made lightly, given that 70 percent of its revenue comes from flights booked through its site. But the comment—tossed into the middle of the battle between Apple (AAPL) and Adobe (ADBE)—is getting the new site a lot of attention for free. Always nice when you relaunch your site’s design.

For Adobe, though, this can’t be good news. Executives in charge of technology at other companies, convinced they need a presence on the iPhone, may follow suit. And if that happens then Flash, widely seen as a ubiquitous web technology today, could begin to seem optional or even irrelevant.