Jobs gives Adobe the “Rip, Mix, Burn” treatment
The … how shall we put it … mercurial temperament of Steve Jobs is legendary. Notably short on patience and long on acidic ridicule, he takes the concept of feedback to withering heights, sometimes reducing subordinates to quivering blobs of protoplasm. As a new profile in Fortune puts it, “Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are ‘insanely great’ or ’shit.’ … Subordinates are geniuses or ‘bozos,’ indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second’s notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his ‘hero-shithead roller coaster.’ ” The public is spared most of this, almost always seeing Jobs in his well-rehearsed role of beneficent provider of beautiful technology, but once in a while he’ll wield the whip for all to see, usually with a purpose. At Tuesday’s Apple shareholders meeting, it was longtime ally Adobe feeling the lash, and all it could do was bite its tongue and take it.
Adobe’s Flash technology is widely used by sites across the Web for everything from navigation to playing multimedia, but the browser in Apple’s iPhone has never supported it, leaving a notable hole in its promise to deliver a complete mobile Web experience. Adobe and a goodly number of developers were hoping that situation would change now that Apple is set to start accepting third-party apps for the phone. On Tuesday, Jobs shot down that speculation, wounding Adobe in the process. The full version of Flash is just too slow to run on the iPhone, Jobs said, and Flash Lite, the version made for mobile devices, just plain isn’t good enough. “There’s this missing product in the middle,” Jobs said. Hmm, perhaps something like Microsoft’s Silverlight?
The relationship between Apple and Adobe has had its up and downs in the years since Adobe’s software helped the Macintosh create desktop publishing, and the ties remain important, especially for Adobe. So when asked to comment on Jobs’ jab, the company kind of mumbled through a cream-of-wheat reply. “Flash and Flash Lite are a huge success,” it said in a statement. “All major handset manufacturers worldwide license Flash today delivering a broad range of mobile devices ranging from feature phones to smartphones and consumer electronic devices. With more than 450 million Flash-enabled mobile devices shipped worldwide and 150 percent year-over-year growth we are on track to see 1 billion Flash enabled devices by 2010. Consumers demand a rich Web experience on any device and platform and Flash delivers just that. We look forward to our continued relationship with industry leaders to deliver engaging experiences to consumers worldwide.” Still, the sting from that kind of public spanking tends to linger and doesn’t bode well for the future. “They’ve been drifting apart for years,” said Rick Chapman, editor of software-industry newsletter Softletter. “Apple can make do, but the question is really what about Adobe?”
Meanwhile, Apple shareholders were in a generally friendly mood for this year’s meeting, but they did approve, in the face of board opposition, a non-binding proposal urging the company to allow investors an advisory vote each year on executive compensation. The board has not responded yet and remains free to do as it chooses.
Seriously. Adobe’s notably fickle and Apple-hostile development efforts don’t exactly make for great relations between the companies.
Mac users lost the best publishing tool around when Adobe killed Framemaker (after promising an OS X native version and reneging).
Mac users had to put up with the piece of junk that is Premiere until Apple introduced the far superior Final Cut Pro. Now Adobe is back in the game with Premiere pro, trying to win back the cutting edge of video production houses.
Let’s not forget the expanding bloatware that is Photoshop. Photoshop 7 was the penultimate evolution of a very good pixel editing software; since then, we’ve only seen glommed-on features and no support for Mac OS or Windows 64-bit memory space. (Dear Adobe: I’d really like to be able to use more than 4 of the 16GB in my Mac Pro.)
On the support side, there’s also the fact that Adobe changed a fundamental way that selections work in CS3 - and didn’t bother to warn customers. They haven’t responded to any of the thousands of requests to change the behavior back to the way it’s been since the first release of Photoshop, either.
I like Adobe, but their management seems more interested in pumping out featureless updates rather than making the software more useful.
There will be no Flash, No Java, and no Silverlight. Safari 3.1 uses WebKit 3.0.
WebKit 3.0 is HTML5 compliant, and includes SVG support and native AAC/MP4 and AVC/h.264. HTML5 also supports client-side SQL storage (think “Google Gears”)
HTML5 makes proprietary solutions like Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX redundant.
http://counternotions.com/2007/11/15/apple-runtime-answer-2/
By forcing everyone to use an open standard instead of the de-facto proprietary one, everyone benefits - yet the short-sighted developer community will still talk about how “control freaky” Apple is and how the iPhone is “crippled” by Jobs “arrogance”.
One has to realize that FLASH was owned by MACROMEDIA and ADOBE gobbled ‘em up … so there is a natural disconnect that ADOBE has to overcome.
pun·dit /ˈpʌndɪt/ –noun 1. a learned person, expert, or authority.
2. a person who makes comments or judgments, esp. in an authoritative manner; critic or commentator.
What is the difference between #1 and #2? Stay tuned for the answer.
Practically speaking, on a 2.5 or even 3G phone, the bandwidth required for many Java movies makes it undesirable. When we ever get the data speed and processing power of a desktop in an iPhone it will then be practical. Web sites should be offering non-flash mobile friendly versions. My first IE portable device was an $800 Phenom LG WinCE unit with slow modem in ‘96, worst software I ever bought, nice device form factor. Actual browsing of pages by iPhones has already outpaced 10 years of Windows various mobile Internet flavors. They made the right decision to exclude Flash for now though gamers are very disappointed. If WiFI is used then one part of the equation is solved. Saying you can do Flash and having it be usable or practical is another matter. Sounds like other companies are taking that rather dishonest route.
There are two communities that WILL be served and MUST be served at the end of the technology day : consumers and software developers.
Arguing that Flash is somehow redundant to other technologies or not already proven technology is ridiculous.
No matter the reality distortion field that Mr. Jobs may generate when he is ‘thinking different’ even he cannot erase all of the Flash content and applications that millions of developers are creating and millions of consumers want.
Flash will be on the iPhone one day simply because the market forces at play will make it so.
Flash is already a checkbox in any computer comparison chart.
Windows Mobile has it, Symbian has it, BREW has it - and the iPhone is going to ignore it forever?
Supply and Demand will take care of everything.