Apple's Wager

I've actually been thinking about this whole 3.3.1 situation in spite of myself and in spite of the silliness of the whole situation. It seems to me that Apple would have been much better of not having made the change to the developer agreement, while at the same time heavily scrutinizing apps written with Adobe's tools.

There's (probably -- I haven't actually seen it) enough leeway in the old agreement that Apple can basically reject any app for any old reason they feel like, anyway, so there's no real value in adding another explicit reason to reject apps written with tools they don't like. If they're just plain lousy apps, reject them for being lousy. If tey call verboten APIs, reject them for that reason. If they load flash files, reject them for having an unapproved interpreter.

My point is simply this: I think Apple could have avoided 90% of the current controversy by simply keeping it an internal matter. Unless there's something here I'm just fundamentally misunderstanding, this seems to be one of the rare occasions where Steve Jobs has completely flubbed the PR situation.