David Stong shared with me two articles about how Apple’s decisions
affect the industry and the drive behind them.
In Apple’s official statement, Thoughts on Flash,
Steve Jobs talks about several reasons behind the decision that they
stopped supporting Flash: openness, percentage of deployment,
reliability/security/performance, battery life, touch-based UI, and
efficiency of the native development tool.
Another post, Mac & the
iPad, History Repeats Itself, discusses how Steve Jobs’ decisions
have helped form how people use computers.
I agree that Steve
Jobs has his vision and great intuition about what people will like.
Apple’s high quality products have been the top choices of those who can
afford them and do not mind their proprietary products. Or, their
products are so good that even those who mind proprietary products will
compromise — in Open Source conferences, most developers uses a
close-sourced MacBook and iPhone, and soon an iPad.
In this
regard, Apple sets the bar high for the industry and users can expect
that they will have better and better products to use.
However, I
am not sure that Apple has a real competitor.
Droid was expected
to provide a healthy competition against iPhone but Apple’s early
entrance in the market has solidify their territory.
Lala.com has
been a great service to music lovers: I could keep my collection of
music online for streaming and never had to worry about my local
storage, all at a very affordable price. Apple acquired Lala.com a few
months ago and just announced that they, as expected, will close it at
the end of May.
Some speculated that Apple acquired Lala.com’s
cloud technology to improve iTunes. While that is probably true, it is
unlikely that Apple will keep the price level of Lala.com. Effectively,
Apple killed its competitor by acquisition.
Coming back to the
reasons Steve Jobs gave for leaving out Flash, I don’t find all of them
equally convincing. I agree that Flash is proprietary and has some
performance/security problems. However, Apple’s software, also
proprietary, have their vulnerabilities, too. Steve Jobs statement, to
me, becomes, “We believe we’ll do a better job than that.” rather than
“We dump Flash because we think their product is irrelevant to users”.
Another
reason that Steve Jobs gave, that Flash is not designed for touch-based
use, is true, but not strong enough — Flash is also evolving. If Apple
managed to put a browser, which is used to view contents also designed
for mouse-based UI, onto a mobile device, there must be a way for Flash
to also work.
The argument about the battery life is even weaker.
Some types of use will consume more power than others. This is already
true for current iPad/iPhone, but we don’t see Apple turning off their
video support.
His claim that there while Flash is widely
adopted, HTML 5 is likely to change. And Apple stands behind the open
format. I agree with that. However, then he gave the example that
“[t]here are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone,
iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.” With Apple’s
strict app approval process, I don’t see Apple is providing a solution
that is promoting openness.
The last reason Jobs gave was to let
developers use the native tool to develop efficient applications, rather
than using Flash to develop something cross-platform but with abstract
layers to slow things down. From the fact that Flash runs fine in
multiple platforms and even old and slower computers, I am not very
convinced that Flash will slow things down significantly. As opposed to
providing Flash as an option, Apple bans it and forces developers who
want to write anything for iPhone/iPod/iPad to use Apple’s coding tool
to write something that only runs on their devices. This will probably
start a cycle between developers and users who end up using Apple-only
products.
Again, it seems that Apple is trying to kill Flash.
With its fine products, Apple is likely to benefit from this bold move
and become an even bigger monopoly in the mobile computing market.
However, the claimed nobility behind the revolution seems to target at establishing
its own nobility.
I very much agree with you, Dave. The PR is quite blinding, particularly backed with big brains.
I suspect it’s almost impossible to have a standard 100% technically motivated. Besides the common cases of Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood, reality at present is always a heavy factor. For example, even though CSS has its technical superiority, in HTML is still preserved due to its historical and present existence. In Apple’s case, the reality includes their business interests. Most technical standards are products of negotiation among major players.
$.02
You cut through a lot of the hype, TK. Excellent; it seems we aren’t getting much unbiased information around these topics. I do think Jobs shares a positive vision, but I know it’s been spun. I wonder if there is an unbiased tech group at Penn State discussing such things as may impact Penn State’s future? It seems to be beyond what the Web Standards group monitors.
I remember Apple/Adobe enmity going back beyond Apple’s slowness in passing off code so Adobe could update their software to run in OSX. Adobe had to make sure Photoshop could handle legacy files across all versions, and on Windows as well as both Mac platforms. Apple didn’t seem to care. And most older designers, though Mac users, can remember when you were never supposed to use TrueType. As good and selfless as one company seems, another company seems just as good and selfless if they have competent PR.
I think that in the end, there need to be standards maintained by an independent international body. For now, the standards seem to favor Apple and Steve complies. I’m not so sure if that will continue if it starts to impede Steve’s singular vision.
Which makes me wonder if standards aren’t an ‘average’ that has no allowance for genius?