>I’m sure there are probably copyright or patent reasons that Adobe can’t easily release flash’s source code, but I really wish they would.
Time to reread what Steve Jobs wrote about it a decade ago! https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Time to reread what Steve Jobs wrote about it a decade ago! https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/https://www.apple...
"whining?" Steve Jobs didn't whine...He built the greatest products in our digital era.
He answered Mossberg and Swisher here at 2:00 on why he wrote Thoughts on Flash. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4177s
">Mossberg: you published thoughts on flash, is it fair to be abrupt?
Steve: Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in the world and the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride carefully technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future and that are headed up and you technology..different pieces of technology go in cycles. They have their Springs and summers and autumns and then they you know go to the graveyard of technology. So we try to pick things that are in there Springs and if you choose wisely you can save yourself an enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything and you can really put energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform rather than just okay because you’re spreading yourself too thin. So we have a history of doing that that. As an example, we went from the 5 inch floppy disk the 3.5 inch floppy disk with the Mac.
>Mossberg: before other people right?
Steve: We were the first to do that we made the 3.5 floppy disk this popular, Sony invented it and we put it in the first products, and there some good reasons we did that, we got rid of the floppy disk altogether in 1998, with the first iMac. We also got rid of these things called serial and parallel ports and we were the first to adopt USB, even though Intel had invented it. You first saw it en mass on iMac. And so we have gotten rid of things, we were one of the first to get rid of optical drives with a MacBook Air, I think things are moving in that direction as well. And sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac people call us crazy.
>Mossberg interrupts: or at least premature maybe.
Steve: No! they call us crazy. But sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’re gonna be the right horses to ride going forward and flash looks like a technology that had its day but is really on is waning and HTML5 looks like the technology that’s really on the ascendancy right now and to incorporate flash into systems is a lot of work there’s not smartphone shipping with flash on it now as you know.
>Mossberg: but you know that there will be right?
Steve: Well, you know there’s going to have been for the last two or three years and every six months it gets updated, so I’m sure that eventually they will and there is a lot of issues with that in terms of battery life and you know security and other things, but more importantly, HTML5 is starting to emerge. You know there’s been an avalanche of people that have said we’re doing HTML5 video and the video looks better and it works better and you don’t need a plug-in to run it, and so while 75% of the video in the web may be in flash, you know 25% going to 50% very shortly is also available in HTML5.
>Kara: so do you say that to consumers, I mean besides the technologies?
Steve: I think consumers outside of the valley and our industry aren’t having this issue…
>Mossberg interrupts: Except when they hold up their iPad and they go to a web page and there’s like a hole there, where a video would be.
Steve: there are holes in some websites but those holes are getting plugged real fast. The holes that exist now are our ads, and that’s the problem for some people.
>Mossberg: Not entirely.
Steve: but that’s the number one holes that are there
>Mossberg: and what about the other community that I think is impacted by this and that’s developers, because what I think a lot of the coverage of this flash issue has overlooked is that yes, flash is a video container and there are other video containers actually have a very rising share each to h.264 and the native HTML5 but it’s also a development environment and there are entire some of them quite beautiful written on a flash?
Steve: an even more popular development environment was hypercard and we were okay to axe that!
>Mossberg: it wasn’t more popular than flash, was?!
Steve: in its day, sure it was.
>Mossberg: on your platform right?
Steve: no no no no. Hypercard was huge in its day because it was accessible to anybody. You could be a hypercard developer. We have over 200,000 apps on the App Store. So something must be going right in terms of attracting developers to our platform!!
>Kara: so your goal your your ultimate goal is to get rid of flash or just to how..
Steve: well, see our goal is really easy we didn’t start off to have a war with flash or anything else we just made a technical decision that we weren’t gonna put the energy into getting flash on our platform, we told Adobe if you ever have this thing running fast come back and show us, which they never did and/but we think we’re not gonna use it, and that was it. And we shipped the iPhone and it doesn’t use flash and it wasn’t until we shipped the iPad and it didn’t use flash that Adobe started to raise a stink about it. We didn’t raise a stink about it, we never mentioned the word Adobe or flash or anything else. We like Adobe we have a lot of common customers with CS you know their Creative Suite software and things like that, so we weren’t trying to have a fight. We just decided not to use one of their products in our platform and so you know they started to say a lot of bad things about us in the press and this and that and it went on for months and that’s why I wrote Thoughts on Flash, because we were trying to be real professional about this and weren’t talking to the press about it, we didn’t think it was a matter for the press and we finally just said enough is enough! We’re tired of these guys trashing us in the press over this and so we wrote down the reasons why technically we didn’t use flash, and they are just as true today as they were when we wrote it as they were six months or a year before that.
>Mossberg: What if people say you know the iPad is crippled in this respect.
Steve: This is America. Things are packages of emphasis, some things are emphasize in a products , some things are not done as well in a product, somethings are chosen not to be done at all in a product and so different people make different choices and if the market tells us we’re making the wrong choices we listen to the market! We’re just people running this company we’re trying to make great products for people and so we have at least the courage of our conventions to say we don’t think this is part of what makes a great product, we are gonna leave it out, some people are gonna not like that, they’re gonna call us names it’s not going to be in certain companies vested interests that we do that but we’re gonna take the heat because we want to make the best product in the world for customers. We’re gonna instead focus our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendency and we think are gonna be the right technologies for customers and you know what?! they are paying us to make those choices . That’s what a lot of customers pay us to do, is to try to make the best products we can and if we succeed they’ll buy them, and if we don’t they won’t! And it’ll all work itself out. So far I’d have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. We’ve sold one every three seconds since we launched it."
He wrote that post, and spoke for 10 minutes explaining all the reasons, and you called him whining.. I will end with a quote from Steve Jobs email to a journalist
"By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"
what have you done that's so great to say that Steve Jobs was whining when he put valid reasons for not going with flash?
HTML5 was nowhere near the capability for interactive apps for a long time. And flash was, just look at those flash game websites, 1000s of them there. His attempt to make the whole argument about videos and not about preserving his walled garden that is app store is as dishonest as the rest of their typical marketing bullshit.
> He built the greatest products in our digital era.
Well maybe that's the problem right there. They were great from a business standpoint (aka getting fat asses fatter), never from user standpoint. Those products enslaved their users because they are closed down annoying i-know-what-you-need-and-dont-need-better-than-you pieces of trash.
It's also ironic that you use this quote:
> Do you create anything
Did he? Or someone else did for him to sell with his holier-than-thou marketing?
Original iPhone supported offline HTML5 apps, with home screen icons and full app saved to home screen ... and iOS still supports that. Yes, you can still distribute purely open apps that work offline to iOS devices outside the app store with zero approvals from Apple or anyone.
Developers preferred the app store even for “apps” that are nothing but a web window, not just about APIs etc.
So Jobs is onto something with the “a product is a package of emphasis” and the market decides.
Sounds like you don’t like the market, which as Jobs noted in that quote, is everything outside the valley bubble.