The current war between Adobe and Apple over Flash is, well, ultimately futile. The war is over Apple not wanting to include in its mobile products Adobe Flash, a program that, according to Adobe, is delivered to 99% of Internet users. If you’ve seen annoying animated ads on Web sites, used browser-based games or watched Web-based animation and movies, chances are it was Flash.
On the one hand you have Steve Jobs, who is being his usual self along with Apple. On the other you have Adobe (makers of Photoshop, etc.), which doesn’t really have a persona that embodies the company. Envision this: The two camps on either side of a net made entirely out of rubber chickens with yells of “closed system” being bandied back and forth like a shuttlecock a few goose feathers shy of a badminton match.
Jobs has seen fit to write an approximately 1,700-word letter about the virtues of not using Flash. Parts of it are snarky and immature and (the closing remarks are especially brutally direct toward a company who has sizeable Macintosh user base) for the most part, it reeks of a sales pitch, rather than an explanation. The Adobe people write blog posts about it which get picked up and essentially used as counter points.
Apple thinks it knows what’s best for consumers and rather than allowing them to choose for themselves, they choose for you. While some may see a virtue in not having to think for themselves, there are a lot of free-thinkers in the world who would simply like the option. Perhaps they’d make the same choice and not install Flash, but it’d be their choice. Jobs is also afraid that developers will use Flash to create applications for Apple’s mobile devices. Oh, the horror.
The first real point of contention that Jobs brings up is that Flash is all closed source. He even uses the phrase “100 percent proprietary” to describe Flash products. Then he points out that “Apple has many proprietary products, too.” It’s essentially a moot point that by bringing up, continually, only serves to waste the end-users’ time.
Adobe says Macintosh devices can’t access the “full Web” because 75 percent of the video on the Web is in Flash. Jobs quips back that the majority of video is in many other formats you don’t need Flash for. He completely skips over animation. Pre-rendered video is one thing, but Flash’s ability to provide interactive applications, animation, and interactive animation is a huge selling point. In regards to Apple products not being able to play Flash games, he points out that the Apple Application store has a large selection. Way to push that sell, Jobs, but you completely forgot to mention that Apple can take any piece of software out of the App Store on a moment’s notice without any input from the developer. Out here in reality, where logic does tend to matter to some degree, that’s what we call a closed system, beating the cyclic bush right back to the first point.
Jobs’s third point is that it drains battery life on mobile devices. True, but running any sort of processor-intensive application does that. Jobs seems to think that people will be using Apple’s mobile products with high-intensity applications and then complaining when the battery runs out. I think that as a society we’ve been using battery-powered devices long enough to know that if you make the device work harder, the batteries don’t last as long. This also goes back to the choice thing. Perhaps I’d rather have five hours of Flash animation on my mobile device than 10 hours of pre-rendered video.
Jobs points out that Flash was made for the point and click world, and he’s absolutely correct. All Flash-based Web sites would have to be rewritten to allow touch-screen controls. That’s fine, but why not allow users of mobile devices to have multiple ways to navigate through a Web site? Oh, right. Choices are bad.
Jobs points out that Symantec says Flash is a huge security risk as if it’s supposed to mean something. Mac users have been laughing at Symantec for years as it tried to break into the Mac market, saying its claims that Macs were vulnerable were laughable, even as the iPad has already had its first virus deployed, and OSX has suffered viruses in recent years.
Apple just needs to be honest with themselves. It isn’t about any of these flimsy reasons Jobs has brought up. The fact of the matter is they want to control the end-user experience because then people have to use their products and they make more money. The practices may not be good for anyone other than the company, but they need not be ashamed. Adobe wants the same things; they want people to switch and use their products instead — exclusively, they hope. That’s called capitalism.
They’re both on their respective side, and end-users are the rubber chickens constantly getting smacked by being in the middle. If Flash was incorporated into Apple mobile devices, then there would be competition, as well as choices. Consumers would win.
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