The corporate grip on opinion in the US is one of the wonders of the Western world - Gore Vidal
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Adobe takes another pop at Apple
MIFFED SOFTWARE OUTFIT Adobe's chief technical officer Kevin Lynch has said that Apple's policy on Flash is anti-competitive and anti-Internet.
He might just as well have added that Steve Jobs smells of wee and the Ipad is a mongrel dog and while he might have got points for accuracy, it probably would not have advanced the glorious war between Adobe and Apple much.
Lynch told Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco that if you look at what's going on right now, Apple's playing with this strategy where it wants to create a walled garden around what applications people can use.
He said the situation at the moment is similar to the railroad industry in the 1800s, where different operators would have different sized tracks, which meant cargo has to be loaded and unloaded every time the railroad cars changed networks. This harmed industry and economic activity in the US, he said.
We are not sure about this. The unification of the railroads in the UK destroyed what had been a fairly vibrant industry. Nationalisation and unification of the train system in Blighty killed an industry where you could catch a train to practically every small village in Britain.
However Lynch said that unification under a glorious Apple Empire is trying to do all that and it runs totally counter to spirit of the Internet.
"It is totally counter to the web. We need to have freedom of transport, open access and letting people compete on the merits they have, not on the gauge of the rails," he said, gently milking the simile.
He claimed that Steve Jobs's problem with Flash is that Adobe has made it work, not that it is buggy, as Jobs has claimed.
Lynch said he doesn't want applications that can not be deployed across all platforms. He predicted that the variety of software from open vendors will force Apple to change its policy. He likened the situation to 1984 in the personal computer industry, when IBM tried to dictate to the PC market.
You remember 1984, don't you? Apple did an advert about 1984. µ
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In Agatha Christie novels you can catch a train from any village to try to establish a plausible alibi for a murder, yes. And joining timetables of competing rail companies was an art in itself. But we still had a national rail service until the 1960s when severe cuts were made, apparently on the basis that if you could get there by car then there didn't need to be a railway, which ignores, for instance, parking.
Dear Mr. Jobs:
We thank you for your participation in this psychological experiment, the goal of which was to study the behaviour of a person convinced he holds nearly absolute power over the world.
Nearly all the people you have been in contact with over the last 40 years have been actors trained to only show respect and reverence to you. All of the products you think you have produced are only mock-ups. People you have seen using them are actors paid to act like appreciative customers, and all "fan boy/girl" forum postings in support of your corporate kingdom are also fabrications for the purposes of this experiment. "Employees" of "Apple" are similarly only actors paid to demonstrate respect (and if/when required, fear).
The "lost iPhone 4G" situation, the "Ellen Degeneres faux commercial" situation, and the "will he share his toys or attack others like HTC, Adobe and others" situations were critical final tests of this experiment.
Your observed behaviour supported the experimental hypothesis that perceived absolute power and adulation from others would exclusively evoke primitive, immoral, self-serving human behaviour.
Again, we thank you for your valuable participation in this important study. Please go home and try and enjoy your retirement now.
Adobe accuses Apple of putting up a smoke screen to hide its own agenda, which is just a smoke screen to obscure their own agenda. Adobe is fighting to create relevance in the mobile space, which they currently lack. All this talk about Apple not supporting flash on their mobile devices is absurd since there is no flash player on any mobile device currently (at least outside of beta products which can hardly be described as shipping stable products). Adobe can cry foul all they want, but the fact remains that no smartphone currently supports flash.
As for Adobe's complaints about Apple not supporting an open Internet and relying on proprietary technologies, we'll isn't that the pot calling the kettle black. Flash is a proprietary technology. Only Adobe controls the future of flash and what it can do and what platforms it can run on, and what video and other multimedia standards it supports. Why would Apple want to trust apps based on this platform when Adobe has shown so little regard for supporting Mac OS X up until now? They've only had more than 10 years to move from carbon to cocoa.
Apple and Adobe both have their own agendas in the mobile and web spaces and are both going to be vocal about what they see as the future. Only time and your expendable income will determine what really happens. Until then don't expect the sparks to stop flying anytime soon.
Louis Wheeler, why would you use a web browser that can't handle flash. I would say Safary is the problem here and not flash. There are other browsers available that work flawless with the flash plugin.
"Who does Apple think they are for cutting of all flash based web sites or having them telling you what web content you're allowed to see?"
You are operating under a misapprehension, gunggel. Apple is not cutting flash based web sites on the iPhone; those websites just don't run on Multi-touch screens. You can't make them to work unless you completely redesign the web page. This seems like a waste of resources when HTML 5 will be coming out in a few years. It makes more sense for content providers to supply videos in both Flash and H.264.
Apple is not blocking Flash ads or video on the Macintosh, either, although running Flash is the only time Safari crashes on me. Usually, it happens when a Video ends and Flash is supposed to give back control.
I don't like Flash advertisements, so I have installed ClicktoFlash to block them. I don't miss them at all.
Alternative modes of transportation including the automobile & highways, and the airplane and airports had a lot to do with the downfall of the railroad industry. Railroad nationalization and unification has helped the industry to compete with these alternative modes.
Pretty much every time my Imac crashes it is flash related. As an Apple customer, I really don't care about these two companies war of words. What I do care about and the reason I bought an Imac after 17 years of Windows misery is that it work properly all the time. For the most part it does that, right up until flash causes it to stop responding or crashes and I have to restart.
I always hit the send report button to Apple and I'm sure many others do as well so I'm assuming they know all to well how many crashes flash causes on Apple products.
I'd like to see Apple release the numbers on just how often flash causes crashes on the macs...
Maybe Jobs is right and flash really is a glitchy nightmare.
Just you wait. As soon as HTC introduces an Android tablet that can run Flash videos for 10 hours before recharging, everybody will see that Steve Jobs was lying.
Real Soon Now!
@Leroy Jenkins, that's why there are browser add-ons that controls such issues with flash ads. Not for long and we will see HTML5 ads anyway. Not supporting flash for that reason is just stupid. Who does Apple think they are for cutting of all flash based web sites or having them telling you what web content you're allowed to see? No thank you Apple, I can make my own decisions what I want to see and what not. I don't need Apple to do that for me.
It's kind of weird that Adobe is whining so much about Apple not liking flash, when the main Adobe products for Apple are just the creative suite programs.
Most people use PCs to browse the internet. Adobe is probably just worried they'll all find out that all those ads that slow down browsing and bring the page loads to a crawl are flash based, and by not having flash installed, they won't have to deal with it.
Flash WAS useful, before all the widespread use for idiotic motion ads. Now it's just another piece of software pushed upon the masses so the company behind it can rake in the dough.
and for steam locomotives to return. Realistically, the latter is probably the most likely.
I'm more than a little fedup with this handbags at dawn. When will Adobe fix flash to work with 64bit. So for me it isn't a problem with not using flash, because everytime I try it kills my browser for me. I'm guessing that adobe would call this a feature..So I can see apples point of view