Chickfight!
I just read some really awesome perspective on the tiff between Apple and Adobe. To begin, lest we forget that the iPhone was the first platform to truly open the world of mobile-app development, Kontra reminds us of whence we came:
Many of the App Store developers got into creating products for mobile devices precisely because for the very first time in history the iPhone allowed them to bypass the limits, cost and sheer operational lunacy imposed by telecom carriers. In less than a couple of years, Apple created an online distribution monster of 185,000 apps and 3.5 billion downloads. The fact that no other app store clone has been able to even approach that ought to tell developers something about the magnitude of the efficacy of the App Store. The grass isn’t greener elsewhere.
Inner Daemon reminds us that Adobe has been rooting for Apple to fail for years (my own personal story of woe and longing is the loss of FrameMaker):
In 1996 when Apple was seemingly on the ropes, Adobe made a crucial business decision and one that is coming back to bite them in the ass. They declared that their primary development platform would be Windows; subsequently, every new application or major revision of a product was introduced for Windows first and followed months later, sometimes never at all, by a Mac version.
After Steve Jobs took over and he was charting out a new course with OS X, Apple reached out many times to Abode to introduce a native version of their suite for the new OS. Adobe never committed – standing by its prediction that OS X would never gain momentum or share and it would ride the Windows ascendancy. Adobe thought that it had the dominant hand and displayed its arrogance in public.
[Now], Apple is clicking on all cylinders – it has not only reinforced its dominance in the creative graphics segment but also the web development platform, the mobile development platform and content delivery. Adobe’s not feeling too good about their dominance or that primary development platform choice any more. Are they?
Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. You made a business decision in 1996 to screw Apple when it needed you most to gain credibility for its fledgling OS with the creative crowd. [And yet, s]omehow, Apple making a business decision to protect its customers from your shitty product is the most egregious ethical concern of our time.
Louis Gerbarg gives a whole lot of insight into Apple’s technical concerns:
What Apple does care about is their ability to control their own development cycles. iPhoneOS runs on extremely tight schedules, with a very high degree of secrecy, and at a pace completely controlled by Apple. I know it is popular to claim that maintaining binary compatibility is easy; that is the argument du jour made by people claiming Apple should just support developers using private APIs. Well, they are just wrong. Ask anyone who has been involved with a couple of releases of Mac OS or Windows about the amount of effort involved in keeping old apps working, especially those using private APIs. There is a reason why the majority of current and former framework engineers who comment on the issue come out really strongly against any use of private APIs.
This isn’t some perceived risk, I can think of incidents where Apple reverted OS changes, dumped new APIs, or was forced to committing massive engineering resources to something it did not want to do because a Must Not Break™ app vendor told them to. Apple does not want to give anyone that sort of influence over them. So ultimately, preventing Flash on the platform is about control, but is not control over the user experience of the Flash applications, or even the languages used. It is about the runtimes they bring on to the system, and Apple’s control over future releases of iPhone OS.
… and Adobe’s use of its developer base to try to push Apple around:
Personally, in this whole thing the most distasteful part is that Adobe used its userbase and their livelihood as a bargaining chip. These kinds of high stakes negotiations have happened in the past many times. They are much more common than people think, and until the last few years Apple was more likely to be on the weaker side of the negotiation. The story of MacBasic is a classic example, but I can think of other (not publicly disclosed) incidents involving Adobe and Macromedia (which was acquired by Adobe, and is where the Flash team comes from) applying extreme pressure to Apple. This is the only case where I feel an active user community was publicly jerked around like this in order for one side to try to gain leverage over the other. That is saying a lot, because I am not pleased with Apple’s actions either, but Adobe put Apple in a position where either Adobe got its way or Apple screwed developers.
Lastly, Kontra wraps it all up nicely:
Over the years, it must have been embarrassing for Steve Jobs to swallow his contempt every time he had to invite an executive from Microsoft or Adobe to the stage at a keynote event to explain why their Mac product was behind schedule and inferior to their Windows version.
However, 2010 is not like 1994. Apple has money, mindshare and the hottest platform to no longer having to beg. Today, Apple is more concerned about having to re-live its recent history — getting jerked around by Microsoft or held hostage by Adobe — than what it thinks would be manageable damage by a few developers that may leave its platform. Some may regard that as being arrogant. For Apple it’s the price of being in charge of its own destiny. To capitulate at the height of its newly found vigor would be suicidal. Suicidal Apple is no longer.
