Apple Policy Said to Prompt U.S. Allegation by Adobe | Hacker News Reader

Apple Policy Said to Prompt U.S. Allegation by Adobe

bloomberg.com

13 pointstvon9 comments

This is like when you were a kid and you got in a fight with your sibling, one of you lost and went and told mommy.

And then, you both got in trouble. Surprise.

Apparently Adobe's managers do not remember lessons learned during childhood.

>Adobe says Apple is stifling competition by barring developers from using Adobe’s products to create applications for iPhones and iPads

What exactly are Apple and Adobe competing over in this particular case? Language? Is code language a market?

I can understand Flash developers feeling that this behavior excludes them from the market, and I understand that Adobe feels (rightly) that this makes CS 5 less attractive, but is Apple competing directly with Flash app developers or with Adobe's CS 5?

I guess it's just not clear to me what competition is being stifled and if Apple directly stands to gain from section 3.3.1 (as opposed to indirectly gaining because of their ability to maintain control of their platform's direction and features).

Apple is competing with other mobile platforms. Adobe wants to provide a portable application environment across these platforms (leaving aside the question of whether flash is a good portable application environment). Apple won't allow it. They want iPhone apps to only be iPhone apps.

The only way Apple could make 3.3.1 work is because they are the dominant smartphone platform that everyone must support. If Google or RIM or Microsoft or Palm were to try the same thing it would fail: they'd get no new customers and hurt their platform. Apple is leveraging its dominant platform to perpetuate its dominance, and that certainly seems to be anticompetitive to me.

Apple made "the dominant smartphone platform that everyone must support" through its own extraordinary and dilligent efforts, and they deserve every bit of their success. I disagree completely with these attempts (both in the media and through legal means such as antitrust law) to cut down tall poppies like Apple - they've achieved their position fairly, and this antitrust talk is just about bringing down a company that is good at its job.

The point of antitrust talk is to prevent a company that has achieved dominance fairly, through extraordinary and diligent effort, from maintaining that position in other ways.

Bringing down companies that once were, but no longer are good at their jobs is the whole point.

The only way for a company to remain "dominant" without doing a good job is for it to curry special favors from the government. This is done usually by lobbying for regulations that harm competitors, while leaving the company relatively unharmed (differences in scale following consolidation are natural, for example, but additional regulatory burden will keep small upstarts from entering the market - think about the way milk is sold in California). Without regulatory assistance, unearned monopolies are impossible to maintain.

No one is begrudging Apple their success. It's Apple's non-technical actions that are at issue here: rule 3.3.1 and Apple's lawsuit against HTC do nothing to make the iPhone better.

If Apple wants to compete on features or price, they will find no objection from me. But what they're doing now smells exactly like what Microsoft was doing in the 90's. I was there, and saw the damage it did to the market and the emerging web.

Okay, but if Apple is competing with other mobile platforms, how does reducing the number of developers able to write for the Apple platform (by cutting out Flash-only developers) make Apple relatively stronger? Seems to me that 3.3.1 makes Apple less competitive by restricting its developer pool.

Is it true that developers must support iPhone OS and therefore must learn C, C++, or Obj-C?

Second, why does Adobe have grounds to complain on behalf of "other mobile platforms" when they are not offering a mobile platform? Apple and Adobe are only competing over choice of original coding language as far as I can tell, but it's not clear to me that language is something that would be subject to federal intervention. Is language a market?

Man the title to this article means nothing.

"U.S. Allegation?" WTF is that.

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