Thursday, April 29, 2010

In RE: Thoughts on Flash by Steve Jobs

A friend of mine sent me the Steve Jobs open letter to Adobe concerning Flash. I replied to him via email, but I thought it might be good fodder for the blog, which is desperately in need of some love. Here's my response to him, without edits:

Interesting. He makes some good points, but there's also plenty of hubris, in my opinion.

This -- "Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open" -- just sounds hypocritical and self-serving, not to mention bitter that Flash managed to become the de facto standard of web media.

Personally, I'd say that Apple and Adobe are pretty much the same. Flash could be considered 'open' because the SWF format is published & well-known, e.g. there are other players for it, just check out Linux. Adobe controls the Flash player, but doesn't control how flash files are made, exported, converted, etc. Apple makes no apologies for locking down what they can, so why expect Adobe to?

His points about Flash being designed for PCs and mice are spot on, though. And his 6th point makes sense just from a strategy stand-point. I think this is less about Mr. Job's "ideals", and more about severing a dependency that seems dangerous to Apple.

He's not just fighting Adobe, though. It's like Windows. Part of its staying power is all the third-parties that bought in to the platform, and have created things people want, and who will continue to create things for it. He not only upsets Adobe, but millions of Flash developers.

(Ok, now I gotta go back to work.)

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