At the MAX 2010 conference a technical demonstration of flash conversion to HTML5 was shown that caught my attention.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryZP00_KhYE
What I found most intriguing was how much more web friendly the resulting div animations become. While there's less obfuscation to protect your hard work, there's also a lower barrier to reuse and remix individual components. At one point in the video Rik Cabanier copies and pastes the div for a bending sign into another site. This form of modular reuse appeals to my aesthetic code philosophy.
It's inspiring to see sharp engineers tackling the problem of write once run anywhere. If only my day job would adopt a more open acceptance of variant operating systems, development tools, and browsers. Large enterprise businesses often lag the lone developer by several years. But that time period is showing how technical advances have accelerated. There's a growing divide between enterprise and cutting edge tech. Now the tools I use at work (IE 7, Win XP, MS Office and Visual Studio), the pipeline for network sharing (T1), and the training programs (ethics, ethics, ethics) feel antiquated without any hope of catching up.
There's little doubt in my mind that tomorrow's leading companies will embrace segmentation and specialization in order to take advantage of drastic technology changes. Each employee struggles with mastering break out tools, yet together with the support of business leadership, they can implement confident solutions for tomorrow's technical challenges.
There will always be industry trailing companies, but they won't be High Tech. Either your business adapts to the best of what's available or faces obsolescence. Market competitors won't be afraid to exploit every opportunity to provide superior products and services.