Apple, Adobe and Openness: Let's Get Real
mobileopportunity.blogspot.com
mobileopportunity.blogspot.com
Really, the primary thing that bothers me about Flash is the way it locks in my content. However, it's clear that I'm not getting the content served via Adobe Air without kill strings attached, so it's a symptom of a larger problem in the market, and not itself the source.
For some value of 'fantastic' which is close to meh. In general, the FOSS stuff that has zero-effort portability isn't the prettiest, especially when evaluated in terms of the native platform they're running on. The prettiest FOSS software is far from zero-effort portability.
(Yes, this includes my own beloved Smalltalks.)
> I was working at Apple when this process happened, and I can tell you that it was searing. Apple had invested countless hours and dollars marketing those products as prominent reasons to buy Macs, and then we saw that investment turned against us when the apps were made available on Windows.
There's an old quote attributed to Napoleon, "If you start to take
Vienna, take Vienna." Adobe failed to take Vienna. Note to other
tech companies: Don't declare your intention to take over the
world; do it first and explain later. (By the way, this explains
both Apple's strategy and Chinese foreign policy, but I digress.)Trendy hate tends to be very specific.
My hate isn't trendy. It's born of experience. One day, I was tracing down some process eating up cycles after I installed an Adobe suite to read PDFs. Lo and behold, it's a VB script process in the background to promote some sort of integration marketdroid crap with MS Office.
I stop using Adobe, and my PDF reading is faster and my machine has more cycles I can use.
Great. I agree that Adobe has some pretty shitty software. No doubt.
My point is that Apple has some shitty software as well. iTunes comes to mind.
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Shitty Adobe software: "I stop using Adobe"
Shitty Microsoft software: "I stopped using Micro$oft"
Shitty Apple software: <insert external fault here>
For me, Shitty isn't a Boolean. It's a quantity or a qualitative assessment. I use Microsoft and Apple software because those particular examples haven't exceeded the threshold.
Adobe is in a different league. Different order of magnitude, really.
(And for the record, Mobile Me chased me off because it exceeded the threshold awhile back.)
I've used enough Adobe software to confidently say that all of their software is not shitty. In fact, a few tools are indispensable. Photoshop, Aftereffects, Premier come to mind.
In this "Adobe vs. the world" motif, all I see is: Adobe the dirtbag, and Apple the renegade hero with faults that preclude their existence.
I, for one, am sick of it. While some of it has plenty of merit, the rest of it is tea-bagging, Republican-style fact-swaying that results in false information and a false result.
Due to the assumptions laid forth for the "greater cause", we end up with no resolve. Just a table of "how we feel about Adobe" to reference without the bother to verify any positions or information or learn any lessons going forward.
The gang mob anti-Flash movement carries with it an original truth that no longer exists in it's current form. Which is: The Flash Player platform should be open. I tend to agree.
But what we end up with is: Death to plug-in arch (a complete opposite of open-web, IMO), death to experimental UI, death to technique that exists outside of W3C. Not understanding that Flash compilers are open source. Not understanding that frameworks like Flash carry with it underestimated advantages to moving the web forward.
This comment will likely get downvoted (if anyone even reads this far before deciding I am pro adobe) and some dude with a backhanded comment goes up. Logical? Nope. Trendy. Yes.
We're not learning anything from Adobe nor is Adobe learning anything from their market. That's their problem, true.
But it's 2010 and we're getting video in our browsers...finally. And the bad guy is Adobe.
Think about that.
As a PostScript developer you were welcome to work with Adobe's low-quality font technology, but Adobe refused to allow any developer to access its proprietary high-quality APIs.
Sounds like something Apple would do, doesn't it?
There are a lot of things I, as a developer, don't like in Apple decisions on iPhone development and App Store policies, but to my record I've never seen such a behavior from Apple.
Apple does not deny developers to use high quality technologies for its platforms, apart of the private API, but that's another matter.
So I might miss something, but in my opinion, if you work on an Apple platform you get from Apple all the technologies to work on it.
No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the matter. Only Apple apps can multitask.
It's an understandable design decision, but it's certainly a parallel. (And to be completely fair it's changing, but you're being intellectually dishonest.)
But I think (my personal opinion, not backed by any data) that this was a decision based on technical matters. From the quoted passage it seems that Adobe was keeping the technology for itself to outpace competition. I don't think this applies to Apple using multitasking while developers can't.
It is not similar in the sense, that on iPhone you have some specific usage scenarios you can use with multitasking. On Android, it is open-ended, you can multitask for any reason you come up.
But that's iPhone apps, they were never intended or claimed to be truly open. Adobe is claiming they "openly published the specification" to PostScript, but they didn't. Compare that to a truly open standard like HTML5. Does Apple have a secret, proprietary API for that?
What they didn't publish at the time was Type1, as they wanted to be the gatekeeper for publishing T1 fonts (see similarity to Apple?). It didn't take long and T1 was reverse engineered, despite the obfuscation.
At the time, PostScript documents could use Type1 and Type3 fonts. Type3 fonts were basically bitmaps, anyone could create one. Type1 fonts were entirely different matter - they were nice outline fonts and there wasn't anything similar. The problem was, that Adobe didn't publish specification how to create such fonts. They wanted everyone wishing to publish a font to go through them (for a fee, of course; I cannot help myself but it reminds me Apple and their App Store).
In the end, it didn't work. Microsoft and Apple joined and created TrueType. The Type1 format was reverse engineered. Later Adobe capitulated and joined MS with Apple to create OpenType, which is open and is superset of both T1 and TT.
Apple on the other hand has released a lot of great software under open source licenses: WebKit, launchd, bonjour, Darwin, libdispatch, etc.
Adobe calling Flash open compared to the corpus of actually open software that Apple has produced is disingenuous, in my opinion.
Other Apple open source software has exactly zero adoption outside OSX, which is also a reason why they are open source. Apple knew they will be not adopted.
Call me crazy, but maybe the PC is easier to develop for. At least the software listed there is still available for the Mac. When Apple bought Emagic, production of the PC version of their digital audio workstation Logic ceased.
I remember the year Photoshop's sales for PC were higher than Photoshop's sales on the Mac. More and more, the myth that Macs are better for creative software eroded.
Nonetheless, it does basically boil down to philosophical differences. I'm still a big fan of my iPhone and will probably even get the iPhone HD (or whatever), but Apple's made it very difficult for me to transfer that enthusiasm to anything else they do.
Not crazy, but maybe confused. Wouldn't market share be a better explanation? The profit motive is the primary motivation to develop for any platform. It easily trumps ease of development.
While Win16 was definitely very similar to MacOS classic, Win32 brought better multitasking and memory management, so developers could tell good bye to memory handles and locking/unlocking them.
The tools for Win32 development were also better. There was a range of compilers and IDEs you could choose from (not only Microsoft, but also Borland or Watcom). For MacOS, you had the terrible Apple tools or Codewarrior kit.
Note that the apps that were created on PC, never crossed to Mac (e.g. AutoCAD or 3D Studio).
I'm not saying that PC market share was not primary motivator, but at the time, PCs were technically better.
Apple didn't lose all those developers because of freedom, those developers were after customers, and it's hard to convince customers to buy your product when you tie them to the high-priced and technologically backward option.
The reality is that Apple fears competition. It's never been able to handle any competition. When NuTech cloned the mac, Apple sued them into oblivion. When Apple start the clone program, the clones sold better machines... so Apple killed the program. When Apple bought eMagic and Nothing Real, it killed off the Windows version of both, because no one in their right mind would choose Apple's platform for such compute-intensive applications when it was so technologically behind the rest of the industry (except Sun, who was even farther behind).
So when buying a mac meant buying a vastly inferior machine, Apple lost a LOT of customers (including most of the high end film and visual FX industry, who went Linux + x86), largely because of the inferiority of the platform.
Today, the mac isn't an inferior platform, it's an identical platform. (I'm talking under the hood, not the ergonomics and OS.)
If Apple were smart, they'd be emphasizing their platform, and encouraging developers by doing the exact opposite of what they're doing. By continuing to support .NET, Apple would be making it easier for developers to make the transition to the iPhone and iPad. Sure, they'd get lots of generic apps, but they already have a huge pile of crud with a few gems here and there, and the better .NET developers who want their apps to success will put in the effort to make their apps iPad/iPhone/OSX compliant in order to better serve their users.
I think this is a critical point. It appears that most large software companies participate in standards bodies, simply to look out for their own interests.
Apple has a history of being very capricious about that.
- Visiting Youtube didn't result in all 8 bars on my menubar, representing my 3GHz CPU, shoot to 80%.
- The developers that wrote the god forsakened CS4 installer got the same treatment as terrorists.
- Products weren't being held in beta forever and shipped in a reasonable timeframe.