Some feedback on my previous article from people back home made me realise I made quite a bold statement without really explaining myself. My argument has no value for some people in SA as I am currently residing in the UK. I am fine with this as I know I will never win the expat argument no matter how hard I try. So this is a lame attempt to cover up some holes I left in my previous post but I can guarantee you there is no back peddling done here.

With regards to "South Africa is scared of Flash" I specifically meant corporate South Africa. The generalisation I want to make is that corporate SA view Flash as an advertising medium for the web. This is fine if you are living in 1995 but in 2007 Flash has so much more to offer your target audience. I target specifically larger corporations in SA as they are very much the core drivers of web technologies in SA. Because they have such a vast reach, they often dictate trends and tech usage within the web domain. Similar to the way radio stations would dictate what to play even though thousands of good tracks are ignored. I feel they have a responsibility towards their target audience to at least trial various technologies. AJAX seem to have taken off in a good way and I would like to see Flash do so too.

Due to various reasons there exist a mentality that SA shouldn't invest in Flash user experiences. Bandwidth is probably the biggest reason. "Having to wait ages for something to download" is one of the favourite lines I hear all too often. Second has to be the penetration stats of the player or in Layman's term how many people have flash. Coming in at a strong third is the unobtrusive detection that has to take place, checking to see if indeed the user has flash or not. The third which is a Nielsen favourite has to be the non existing back browser button. Another one would be deep-linking, where you can target a specific URL and link to a specific page. These are what I consider some of the top reasons why SA companies do not want to use Flash. The irony is that all of the above mentioned has been possible for a few years now. It makes me wonder why then businesses still doesn't want to invest in Flash. Maybe I have it wrong and there exist other reasons?

Bandwidth is a hot topic in SA, or the lack thereof should I say. For the last few years people have been complaining of the poor connection speeds compared to others worldwide they receive on so called broadband services. So much so that some of the service providers had some explaining to do because their promises were misleading and unrepresentative of actual connection speeds. This is not a new thing, all over the world service providers claim certain transfer rates but all of them now include the disclaimer subject to location, especially with wireless. See, your location makes a difference. If the service provider doesn't have broadband (fibre optic) lines installed then how can it promise speeds that fall within the broadband category. Installing dedicated lines are expensive and the lack of infrastructure is but one of the reasons why broadband in SA is so expensive. Everyone in SA knows this is a problem. Websites like myadsl.co.za and mybroadband.co.za are fighting the cause. The monopoly for Telkom is officially over. Neotel is funding the undersea cable being installed to India. This is due to be finished in the near future. Broadband is on the horizon. But what about the current situation? My statement refers to the current situation.

Flash does not have to be rich media. Just like a plain HTML site, flash websites can contain images, text and hyperlinks and that's it. With this a greater user experience. And if you do have a graphic heavy site staggering the loads can be quite effective. My point is any good flash developer would be able to build a site and give the user a very similar experience to a normal HTML site. A very good example of this would be the rich media site ontwerp.tv . These guys are shit-hot motion graphic artists and have done some amazing work. Their showcase is rich media but still the load to me is acceptable. Their target audience would obviously not use a 56K modem, but ADSL would load this site without too much load-time. The videos all use progressive download and the images are loaded separately. All of this makes for a pleasant user experience as the user knows what is happening. Granted this is a creative site and not your average stiff-upper lip corporate. Another example of a more content driven site that obviously makes use of some sort of content management system is entertainmentafrica.co.za .

So back to my initial statement. The reason I think South Africa is scared of Flash websites is because not enough is being done to educate the right people. I think a lot of the decision makers in SA have the wrong advisors. People making decision on user experiences without have the right knowledge to do so. You mention Flash and immediately the numbers argument come up even though 97% of the world have the Flash plugin installed. And for the other 3% there is exist detection with a very good user experience. So if worldwide corporates like Vodafone, SonyEricsson and Sony all use Flash, then why are there so little SA corporates who doesn't.

I think the broadband issue is a really big one, and I think in some instances it has become an absolute scapegoat for a lot of decision makers. Even though I disagree I do suspect that when the time comes, Flash developed websites will be booming in the SA broadband revolution. Lets just hope that the undersea cable helps to speed things up in a political sense if only as this will be vital to increase the household numbers of broadband users.