Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I think there's a huge amount of opportunity for Adobe here. Application development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever.
Pushing Flash because it's a dominant player in a legacy market is a little like going back to 1995 and arguing that people ought to be able to make web servers in PowerBuilder because that's the language everyone is using for business applications.
Adobe doesn't call me up and tell me how to write software, so I'm loathe to tell them what to do. I'll just say that it would be incredibly cool if they went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices.
Apple might though.
Some other people called them up and begged to be chained to the oars of a proprietary slave galley, and they told them that if they wanted to be slaves they had to be Apple's slaves and not Adobe's slaves.
Many of these people are happy and well-fed, so I have no quarrel with their choice. But I point out that it's their choice and Apple have offered each and every one of us the right to write free applications for iPhone and iPad.
Too bad you can't write any apps (preferred method for accessing information on the iPhone) using an open and free standard.
It's not just Adobe this effects, it effects any framework. Including the one built on free and open standards: http://www.phonegap.com/
But it's YOUR log cabin!
http://blogs.nitobi.com/jesse/2010/04/14/phonegap-and-the-ap...
Tomorrow it could also be a "fact" that PhoneGap violates the same 3.3.1 clause.
Truth is, the "facts" are flexible for Apple, and not so for the developers who dedicate several hours learning a specific approach/workflow.
Apple doesn't force anybody to develop for iPhone, if you don't like it, plenty of other platforms. Apple, like every other company, is a business, and they make business decisions, the ones they think are better for their company and profits. Apple didn't force you to learn "a specific approach/workflow" using Titanium. Next time spend those hours learning the native tools they give you and you'll be fine.
The argument that Flash kills the battery is without merit if Apple is pushing canvas+js, which uses as much if not more CPU (based on personal findings as well as written testimony from neutral developers; ie: not Apple PR nodes).
#2. Users.
#3. Developers.
You are last on Apple's list of priorities. If you are irritated by that, I empathize. Go write for a different device.
They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell, there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.
Now, to the question whether Apple paid Google: I don't think anybody saw them writing Google a big check, "paid" in this sense is making concessions to Google, like having Google as the default search engine. This was of course in the good old days when Schmidt was on the board. If you think about it, transcoding all those videos into H.264 is a huge effort, something that Google wouldn't have taken lightly. Of course, at that time YouTube was (and still is) under intense pressure to make profits so that may have helped Apple's hand.
Not sure making that point deserves a -4.
Fact of the matter is: Flash was necessary to access YouTube before Apple demanded the H.264 transcoding.
There were the obvious performance problems, which caused apple not to support flash in iphone.
They sure have a "killer" product(which has worked for them this far), but html5 support by websites is increasing everyday. This is probably because not only it's natively supported and doesn't need a external plugin to run, but overall experience is much better than flash itself.
I think there is not much that adobe can do now to stop this but get along and write great tools for html5 itself.
For example, Visicalc was a killer product: People bought computers to run Visicalc, rather than buying a spreadsheet to run on their computers. PageMaker was a killer product: People bought Macs to run PageMaker rather than choosing a desktop publishing program to run on their Macs.
For all its ubiquity, Flash is not a killer product outside of the video delivery realm: People obviously do not choose a phone to run their Flash games, and developers seem fine learning an entirely new language (Objective C) and framework (Cocoa) to build iPhone applications.
Flash is a killer product in exactly the same sense that J2EE is a killer product.
And in the technology world today, I'm not sure there is any such thing.
Seriously, you have to be a complete fool to CHOOSE to build an IDE on top of the bug-ridden warthog that is eclipse, do a bad job of implementing it, and then on top of that charge for it.
Given the choice, I would pick Silverlight over Flash without hesitation -- because as a developer I want the tools that will let me do my job most efficiently without forcing me to do it THEIR way, and the Silverlight toolchain does precisely that. Expression Blend + Visual Studio isn't perfect, but it blows the doors off of eclipse and Flash.
They should also try to win over application developers community which apple have mostly ignored/dictated upon so far.
But it has worked in the past. Popular opinion has already spoken, in the form of iPhone sales. Lack of Flash did not prevent the iPhone from being a success for the past 3 years, nor has it been desired enough to motivate other phone manufacturers to put Flash on their phones. Or motivated Adobe to make a good version of mobile Flash, for that matter. Adobe just wants Flash on the iPhone because there's a big market of developers they can sell their tools to.
... except for all the ones using Android. RIM's supposedly also working on Flash for the Blackberry.
There are a lot of consumers who are perfectly happy using a smartphone without Flash. I'm willing to bet it does not give RIM or Google any major advantage in the market.
Except if they can't get it on the iPhone they may as well be Loki Games. They need to be on the dominant player to gain traction, and it doesn't look like the dominant player is willing to let them gain any traction.
But if there is some new kind of application that I can't imagine that they facilitate, some new category that is so compelling for end users that they buy whatever phone runs the new application, then another phone can supplant iPhone the way PCs supplanted Apple IIs.
If Adobe's product is the dominant way to write the new kind of app, Adobe will ride this new market the way Flash rode the explosion of the web.
But fundamentally, it has to be something new that makes all of the existing apps seem like yesterday's news.
Instead, Adobe went and bought Omniture for $1.8B. The acquisition has "completing the loop" written all over it. These are the actions of an incumbent who is more concerned with milking their position than maintaining it. We should be glad Apple lighting a fire under Adobe's feet; somebody needs to remind them to compete.
I'm not for flash, but some of the authoring tools available from Adobe are difficult to copy. I'm thinking how would I do some of that key frame animation that's been in flash for years in html5? Tweening?
Is this another case where the competition is fended off for just enough time to build the software in-house or buy it in?
This campaign is all about shaping public opinion and if they succeed Apple will pull down their artifical wall.
IMHO that's what this whole campaign is all about. Back fifteen years ago when Microsoft was playing a variation of this game by not giving equal access for outsiders to all their api you guys sided against Microsoft.
Now that it's Apple doing it why are you using Microsoft's old argument that the complainer needs to just go back and innovate? In case you haven't noticed Adobe is doing plenty of amazing things.
Outside of HN and the tech community, the general public doesn't give a SHIT about this kind of argument. Adobe can try to shape public opinion all day long, and it won't matter in the end. The only way they can survive is creating innovative products. Lately, they seem completely incapable of doing that.
The key difference is the monopoly issue. People have a choice today about what operating system they want on their computer and smart phone, and developers have a choice about which platform they want to develop on. This wasn't the case back in the bad old days.
There are too many ways to mix UI created code, time-line/movie clip stuff, and actual ActionScript code. It can make for some nightmare projects. At least this was the case a couple of years ago when I unconditionally stopped working in Flash.
XCode is not perfect by any means, but way better than flash. It finds the right balance between interface building in a GUI and straight-up coding. Objective-C can be weird, but less weird than ActionScript. Oh, and XCode is free.
So, regardless of the business side, or even the end user experience side, I (and I think most developers) would choose XCode and Objective-C over Flash and ActionScript.
Now they've again gone back to pandering for sympathy. It's lame.
Nonetheless, this article is stupid. The author is hopping on the dogpile and saying all of the classic "talking points", hoping to pander to the audience with the right amount of fluffing.