Many wisely chose to wait before putting Flash 8 content on the web. For a business, blocking a large portion of your customer base is a bad idea. As I’m sure you’ve read, Adobe recently released their first Flash Player 8 version penetration data. Now, 8-ball sits on about 50% of machines out there. The question on my mind is, are we at a point where a company could reasonably take advantage of new features of Flash 8?

Assuming that it takes a bit of time to develop the content, would it be safe to assume that penetration would be strong enough by the time a project is ready to deploy? Obviously, different projects have different target audience requirements, so don’t worry too much about the details. One thing to consider is that web advertisers are starting to switch to Flash 8 content. People may not like ads all the much, but if the ads don’t look right because Flash Player 7 doesn’t render them correctly, many will upgrade quicker (as odd as that sounds). Likewise, I’m sure Flash Player is still sending out the new upgrade notifications. Discuss.