Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife
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The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.
That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so.
But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.
† One that Jobs did not make, and that I do not agree with — I think any platform can make its own rules, and game consoles have set the precedent for the more closed model.
There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience.
But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense.
Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.
A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.
Edit: It has nothing to do with morality. It's my own vested self interest that makes me wary of Apple. To bring up morality is a way of minimizing my views.
In the medium to long term, end-user quality is negatively affected by adopting close standards.
It's not enough, for example, for me to wax eloquent about how much I love the color green while I'm wearing a purple shirt. It is possible, after all, to love both open models and closed models in different contexts.
But the author meets this standard. For example, he points out that Jobs says, in effect, that Adobe should have moved their Carbon apps to Cocoa, even though Apple hasn't done so in some cases.
Jobs made no such statement. Rather, he observed that Adobe was very slow in passing Apple's platform improvements on to its customers, and the implication here is that it would be unwise for Apple to allow middleware to put Apple in a position where Adobe could do the same thing again for thousands of apps.
But he made no claim about what Adobe ought to have done, or should have done. Rather, he gave a reason for the policy decisions that Apple has made.
What the author points out is that it's odd (hypocritical?) for Jobs to pick on Adobe as the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X when Apple itself has not finished that transition (iTunes) and was very slow to do so in some cases (Finder).
I did use "in effect" to avoid going back and getting a quotation. I was lazy. But the quotation is there. I think it's overkill to describe me as using a straw man argument.
Regardless, Apple's own development is under Apple's own control. The current question is why they are not willing to be at the mercy of a vendor that is not only beyond Apple's control, but also has an established history of lagging. You may not like their decision, but it is prudent, consistent with their stated values, and consistent with their actions.
The author did not understand the function of this paragraph, and based his attack on a faulty interpretation.
I'm surprised that so many denizens of HN seem to be having trouble with the concept of a chain of dependencies, and how that makes the cases of iTunes and the Finder very different.
Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds.
"feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion"
I'd say Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software fits the bill perfectly. Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time.
Great point, actually.
I think a quotation to support your interpretation above would be helpful, because it's not at all what I read in "Thoughts on Flash" today.
That is, I did not get the impression that Apple thought Adobe ought to deliver anything open. They were merely pointing out that it is not — and that this does not meet Apple's vision for what they want to support within Mobile Safari.
In fact, he went so far as to concede that "Apple has many proprietary products too."
And Mac apps. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are still 32-bit Carbon, with no indication of that changing anytime soon.
So I want to comment in favor of stressing the above comments, hard. Considering a substantial discussion of the semantics of the word "hypocrisy" followed, with some people taking one side, and some the other, let's make a correction to the original presumption so that even those who didn't believe it to be hypocritical can come into agreement.
"The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform." is false. The claim is that since Apple ships major OS X apps that don't use Cocoa, it's hypocrisy to attack Adobe on those grounds.
Edit: Actually Jobs's words chide Adobe as "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X", so the debate might be a little bit more than moot. I still think it's entirely fair, though, to ask of Apple in the same vein, "Hey, why so late for you guys to fully adopt Mac OS X?"
Many think the web has proven that cross-platform apps are fine. It hasn't — the web is its own platform.
Not really. If the difference was that big, he would have devoted resources to porting his own software. Being the perfectionist he is, and not porting his own software, one has to conclude the differences just aren't that big.
I assume the reason they haven't been rewritten is the same reason that QuickTime 10 isn't finished yet. But I don't know what that reason is.
I see a normative claim:
Software systems should do X, Y, and Z
It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, even if it is defensible.
I would say it's hypocritical to hold those of a class including yourself to standards which you do not meet. That is, it's not hypocritical (however blameworthy it may or may not be) to say, "Everyone but me should do X, while I should do Y," but it is to say "Everyone should do X" while actually doing Y.
You can see Jobs trying to avoid hypocrisy in the original post by asserting that web standards should be open, while other software systems have no such obligation.
"...we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open."
> Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms. For example, although Mac OS X has been shipping for almost 10 years now, Adobe just adopted it fully (Cocoa) two weeks ago
I was thinking specifically of the Cocoa norm -- which iTunes apparently does not meet -- I should have made that more clear.
How much more open is H.264 than SWF and FLV, anyway?
> Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe
Assuming Jobs is not declaring an obvious tautology, he is omitting FOSS efforts such as Gnash and Swfdec.
I don't think it's that clear. I think it's more likely that it's a practical reason for the last sentence of he preceding paragraph:
Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
They are establishing Adobe's track record of keeping current on underlying platform enhancements.
> They are establishing Adobe's track record of keeping current on underlying platform enhancements.
None of that refutes whether or not Apple considers using the Cocoa API exclusively as a norm. I think it's quite clear that they do. Are you really suggesting otherwise?
I agree that the web should be built on open standards but for exactly the same reasons that digital audio and video and mobile computing ecologies should also be open.
The reality is that they want full control of products they make, and 'open standards' for products that they don't make. Nothing to do with the supposed benefits of 'open'-ness, entirely to do with that is and is not under their control.
The simple fact that the present article accuses them of hypocrisy. For the accusation to stick, one must compare their actions to what they actually say - not to what we erroneously infer from it, or to some semantic-changing paraphrase, or to outright straw men - but to what they actually profess.
Yes, there is a larger debate about software freedom, but there are many of us who value the proprietary software model and open standards and free software for different reasons and in different contexts, so people who are dogmatic one way or the other don't get to set the terms of the debate either.
Regardless, the larger debate is not germane to the current accusation. Retreating to the larger debate does not help make the accusation stick - it's just a way of changing the subject while making it seem as though you have not.
I mean Apple really does care about the user experience, more so than any other company that I can think of. And yet even they have not managed to put together a good user experience for their cross-platform app. On the Mac it isn't hooked up to all of the Cocoa hotness, and on the PC, well, the less said, the better.
It is Apple's firsthand experience with the problems you can have during cross-platform development that is informing their decision to strongly discourage such development on the iPhone platform.
That isn't true to the best of my knowledge, and a check of a handful of good dictionaries (online and paper) confirms this.
Here's one link, for example: http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1...
Although the charge of hypocrisy often comes up in moral contexts, that isn't a requirement.
Therefore in order for a hypocrisy to be a useful word I think it needs a more rigorous connotation. I'm not saying the moral angle is the correct one, but I certainly think that Jobs' letter is far from any reasonably useful definition hypocrisy.
But my point was more limited: the parent poster writes as though vast numbers of people don't understand the simple concept of hypocrisy. That might be fine, too, except that it's his definition of 'hypocrisy' that is non-standard.
hy·poc·ri·sy [hi-pok-ruh-see] –noun,plural-sies.
1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.
2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.
3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.
I don't see how the author misuses the word "hypocrisy" at all. It appears to me that his case relates to #2 above - Jobs pretends to hold an attitude promoting open standards etc. when that is not the real motivation behind his actions at all.
What specific parts do you think suggest feigned virtue? The parts where he claims to want a better environment for developers? That's the only place where I think you might have a toehold.
It must sort of suck to be Apple community relations right now. If you act according to your business plan, you get railed at for being imperious and arbitrary. If you then explain that business plan and your rationale, people immediately see it's not all nobility and grace and get pissed. The brand perception and loyalty that Apple has spent so much time building can certainly be a double-edged sword.
Jobs said all standards pertaining to the web should be open, not all software. He admits that they have proprietary systems for native apps.
Apple believes that browsing the web should not require a proprietary plugin. I don't see any hypocrisy in that.
"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?"
...
"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour--you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
...
"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."
"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." "Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter.
(http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...)
There were many good points in the article, and that's only one of them. Thoughts on the others, particularly the 'openness' of H.264 or lack thereof?
It's even worst if you are supposed to be leading by example, as cocoa is apple's own design.
I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too.
Damn you beach ball!
That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI programming. Do your I/O in a background thread.
I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing.
This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.
Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball.
Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app.
Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball.
Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?
Because 90% of those cycles are spent in other processes while your kernel is waiting for your blocking I/O to finish, and 5% or more of the rest are taken by the kernel to let other tasks run. </pedantic>
I do wonder if the trend to use WebKit for a lot more things will continue.
I still can't believe Apple so thoroughly neglects 90% of their customers.
Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.
He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.
I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been
an open standards company
Show me this for Flash:
Or this:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1063/
And check out paragraph 2:
http://webkit.org/projects/goals.html
Fire up Chrome to check out how many re-implementations of WebKit are out there based on this open source and open standards base.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf/
> Or this:
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Home
> And check out paragraph 2:
http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/current_partners.h...
2. You didn't show the same thing for open source. OS X is arguably the family jewels. The equivalent for Adobe would be CS 5, not Tamarin or a Flex SDK.
3. You didn't show the same thing for the open source goals. That press release blurb and list of "partners" like Atlantic Records, Paramount and Lionsgate does not correlate to the paragraph promising to give WebKit back with BSD and LGPL style licensing, and listing corporate "industry leaders" sponsors is not the same as running a public chatroom and IRC channel for webkit.
It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend.
The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.
I hated Flash on Windows.
I happen to hate it more on Mac.
I would go so far to say it's a bad format AND a bad port. It's not an either-or situation. Just because Flash sucks less on Windows doesn't mean it's a good format.
Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes, but it's necessary to sell more iPods.
Not that I agree with their policies, but this article's arguments aren't very good.
It's like the owner of McDonalds not wanting to take his wife to a McDonalds for their anniversary — he's not saying nobody should eat there, just acknowledging that it's rather low-class for the given situation.
An apt analogy: The owner of a four star restaurant says that McDonalds is shit food, and refuses to let patrons who eat at McDonalds into his restaurant. Then, when not at work, this owner goes and eats at McDonalds. That's what is happening here, and yes, its hypocritical.
Jobs' position is that cross-platform apps suck. Apple is mainly concerned that iPhone apps don't suck. If Windows apps suck, Jobs isn't going to cry too much.
They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.
I miss the generally geeky articles on alternative operating systems, but ArsTechnica's open source coverage started to pick up about the time that I stopped reading OSNews that I had pretty much forgotten about it until today. Reading this article made me remember why I stopped going there.
Let me also guess - you own a Mac and an iPhone, and are mad because someone is saying bad things about your precious Apple. Correct?
With regard to the author’s points, they may be sincere but I don’t find them convincing. For example, no matter what you think of the quality of Windows iTunes, the idea was never to commodotise the underlying operating system. A calmer and more convincing argument against Job’s statement would simply be to ask what if Microsoft decided to “preserve their UX” by banning any agent that rendered HTML5?
... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads.
Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going "Grrrrr..."!
If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
with respect to "private api" arguments made here: http://www.marco.org/500743718
That makes you a hypocrite too.
However I enjoy flash videos and flash games. I don't want someone telling me I can no longer play these games.
Silverlight?
Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.