The short version:
Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future.
The longer version:
The upcoming 4.0 release of the iPhone OS will come with licensing language that prohibits the use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler. The compiler is a clever way around the absence of a Flash interpreter on Apple’s smartphone OS. It takes Flash code in and outputs iPhone OS code, allowing Flash content and apps to run on the iPhone (and iPad). Problem solved.
Not so fast, says Apple, we’ll only allow applications that are written “natively” with our tools. No cross-platform tools, no Flash-to-iPhone compiler, no Flash.
Less than 24 hours later, an Adobe employee, Lee Brimelow, posts a virulent critique of Apple’s latest prohibition, titled “Apple Slaps Developers In The Face”. He concludes with a vigorous ‘Go screw yourself Apple’ and then adds a postscript: ‘Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.’ Ah, yes. The one-way mirror…
[What the irate gentleman fails to say is this: The only developers slapped in the face are those who don’t use Apple development tools because they want to write a cross-platform app that may or may not use the particular features of the iPhone OS.]
He’s not alone in condemning Apple. In his blog, sunnily called “Why does everything suck?”, Hank Williams asks if “Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad” and wonders about “Insane Restraint of Trade”.
Adobe appears to be worried. In its latest SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock market regulator) filing, the company admits that its ‘business could be harmed’. If Apple succeeds in turning developers away from Adobe’s tools, a new version of which, CS5, is about to be announced, well, the money pump will stutter.
There are calmer minds, however. In his highly-recommended blog, Daring Fireball, John Gruber explains why Apple changed the iPhone OS licensing agreement. It’s strategic, really: Apple doesn’t want anyone else to have control over which OS features the applications have or don’t have access to. I’ll explain in a moment why it’s rational for Apple to fend off cross-compilers, and why it’s not too rational for Adobe employees and others to criticize Apple for keeping control of its future.
But, first, a bit of history.
Apple and Adobe are an old couple, going all the way back to the early Mac days. Adobe had created beautiful fonts, a PostScript interpreter, and had absorbed Aldus for its seminal program, PageMaker. That’s how the LaserWriter was born and the era of desktop publishing began. Besides being crucial to the Macintosh by creating so much desktop publishing software, Adobe also acquired and published Photoshop in 1990, at first exclusively on the Macintosh.
One is tempted to say that without Adobe there would be no Macintosh and no Apple. Steve Jobs and John Warnock, one of Adobe’s founders, were close, even if things didn’t always go swimmingly. An Apple engineer, Gifford Calenda, began to develop TrueType, an alternative to Adobe’s “mathematical” fonts. I was at Apple when we had to make the buy-or-create decision. The basic set of Adobe fonts cost about $30, if memory serves. If Gifford and his colleagues succeeded, which they eventually did, we could get our fonts for “free”. To make sure the fonts got industry-wide adoption, Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft for free. The business model wasn’t font revenue but Adobe license fee avoidance. Adobe, understandably, wasn’t too pleased with this.
Sometime during the mid-nineties, fearing the Mac wasn’t going anywhere, Adobe made Windows its priority. Adobe’s key applications were first written for Windows and then adapted for the Mac. This continued even after Jobs’ “reverse acquisition” of Apple, when he brought NeXT technology and people to breathe new life into the Mac OS (but without Adobe’s Display PostScript, the engine behind the NeXT graphics system). Today, much to Apple’s persistent chagrin, the Mac version of Photoshop is written on an older version of the Mac platform, and the result is perceived as being inferior to the Windows version.
Coming back to cross-platform tools, Adobe created PDF, the Portable Document Format, and the editing and rendering Acrobat and Acrobat Reader programs. Running “everywhere”—on Windows, Mac and Linux and, later, on mobile platforms as well—PDF became the standard for presentation-quality documents. (Microsoft tried to kill PDF with its XPS format but failed.) Ironically, Apple 2.0 wholeheartedly endorsed and licensed the PDF format. You don’t really need Adobe programs (Acrobat Pro, about $380, and the free Acrobat Reader) to read or edit PDF files on a Mac. All Macs come with a multi-format document reader called Preview, a neat program that reads, edits, annotates, combines PDF files, and “converts everything into everything”.
In 2005, to finish our simplified history walkthrough, Adobe acquired Macromedia, a multimedia and Web development tools company. Adobe’s technical and market strength made Flash and related tools the de rigueur platform for multimedia content on the Web. A true industry standard, 85% or more of all Web sites use Flash. People are trained on it, the content creation and distribution tools exist and they work reasonably well.
So what’s Apple beef with Flash?
Focusing solely on the iPhone, it seems Apple doesn’t like Flash for two reasons: performance and strategy. The former is possibly fixable, although far from a sure thing; the latter is absolutely unresolvable and lies at the heart of the conflict. With Flash, Adobe wants to win the Platform War—not a skirmish, not a battle, the whole thing.
Picture the paper roll that carries instructions for a player piano. All the player piano manufacturers agree to a standard format for the roll and, as a result, you see a great quantity of good music punched into the format. A company, let’s call it PPP (Player Piano Platform) automates the transcription of sheet music into industry-standard cross-platform rolls.
But, you think different. You invent a player organ. The standard rolls will play on your organ but they can’t control the stops and registers and multiple keyboards, so you depend on the goodwill of the PPP company to create a new, expanded roll format that makes full use of your player organ’s features. There are Beethoven symphonies adapted for single keyboard player pianos, they sound terrific… If only they were reorchestrated for your player organ. But no dice, the PPP company sticks to its common set of cross-platform features that are found on all player pianos.
I think I’ve belabored the metaphor enough.
Steve Jobs has seen enough in his 34 years in the computer business to know, deeply, that he doesn’t want to be at the mercy of cross-platform tools that could erase Apple’s competitive advantage. He doesn’t want to wait and beg and bitch and moan until Adobe supports the registers on Apple’s player organ. (Diplomatically or not, Jobs recently called Adobe “lazy”… But that was intra muros, in an internal all-hands company meeting.)
Does anyone mind that Jobs won’t sacrifice the truly strategic differentiation of the iPhone platform on the altar of cross-platform compatibility? Customers and critics don’t. They love the end-result. Nor do developers. There are 185,000 apps in Apple’s App Store, 3,500 already for the iPad. Philanthropists at Kleiner Perkins, the noted Valley VC firm, are doubling (to $200M) the size of their iFund, a fund dedicated to iPhone and now iPad investments.
Let’s perform a thought experiment. By the end of 2010, there will be more than 100 million iPhone OS devices (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad). You’re the webmeister at an important content site. The boss comes in and asks you why you’re not supporting the iPhone OS devices. ‘Our stuff is all Flash-based, chief, those guys don’t run Flash’. You’re about to become the ex-webmeister. The boss, a really patient sort, asks you to “think different” about all these “non-compliant” customers, each of whom has an iTunes account backed by a credit card, and has developed the habit (encouraged by Apple) of paying for content. So, one more time, with feeling: What’s your answer?
[Update: The war of words -- and software tools -- continues.]
This time, a Facebook group to fan the flames. See here.
And a response from Steve Jobs: “cross-platform tools produce substandard applications”.
Also, interesting comments, some very knowledgeable, at the end of this piece.
Related columns:
- Web video: Microsoft, Adobe or HTML 5? TweetWe have yet another standards battle on our hands — you might say screens, as it concerns Web video. Or we might watch our wallets, as the fight is about who gets the biggest share of the money spent delivering multimedia on our computers, smartphones and, soon, TVs. My money is on HTML 5, co-opted [...]...
- Apple Maps: Damned If You Do, Googled If You Don’t TweetWhile still a teenager, my youngest daughter was determined to take on the role of used car salesperson when we sold our old Chevy Tahoe. Her approach was impeccable: Before letting the prospective buyer so much as touch the car, she gave him a tour of its defects, the dent in the rear left fender, [...]...
- iPhone Applications: Apple people now believe in a Supreme Being TweetNo, no, not Steve Jobs but an even higher entity smiling upon the company. As I hope to show, Apple’s hard work years ago is now about to pay huge unexpected dividends on the iPhone. When the iPhone first came out of Steve Jobs’ quasi-divine hands in January 2007, it was a hack, the result [...]...
- Under the hood: Google Apps and Apple TweetWith its Cloud Apps, Google tells a nice, simple story: All you need is a browser. Life is simple, we take care of everything, no more fighting with fat, expensive desktop bloatware. You can access your data and our apps Anywhere, Anytime…if you have an Internet connection. If you don’t, as we’ll see in a [...]...
- War in the Valley: Apple vs. Google TweetIt was long overdue: Eric Schmidt (Google’s CEO) finally resigned from Apple’s Board of Directors. Usually, these resignations are handled in the smoothest of ways: Thanks for the distinguished service and the like. This time, Steve Jobs issued a pointed statement: “Unfortunately, as Google enters more of Apple’s core businesses, with Android and now Chrome [...]...
113 Comments
The prohibitive license is not part of the “upcoming” release. It is effective immediately and for all existing developers and OS versions.
Why are some people always so eager to excuse hisStevenes’ weird attitudes and moodswings?
Why – if cross plattform development tools produce such bad output – weren’t they banned right from the beginning?
And why isn’t it ok to have a bell curve of applications from bad to wonderful?
Reminds me of the people who told me in January that the future of the OS is the iPhone approach (who – but geeks – needs access to files and folders?). I had a good laugh when iPhone OS 4.0 introduced – folders….
Pagemaker was created in 1985 and bought by Adobe in 1994. The Laserwriter appeared in 1985. If I’m not mistaken, originally Adobe Fonts were extremely expensive
Spot on with your analysis. Here’s the hiccup. Nobody can build a sustainable business off the iPhone/iPad platform. Can’t be done while Apple insists on all the revenue. I bet everyone of the iFund companies are doing cross platform solutions. Have to, otherwise where’s the $50m a year business?
Here’s the cross platform opportunity – The Internet. Only platform that binds everything together. If you can get your web app to “run everywhere” (search etc) then it’s game on. HTML5 is the feint – it’s all about Search and will end up being half the value everyone thinks it is.
185,000 apps sounds cool, 50 apps per user sounds cool. Reality is somewhat different. Try 5 apps per user, and 2 of those are free and the other’s cost under $3 – there isn’t enough money there.
I know lets solve it with advertising (sigh). Oops Apple just took the wind out of our sales again. Personally I think Apple are going to end up with 100% of their pie. Great for shareholders – not so good for the rest of us. The good news is that there’s the Web and 5 other platforms one of which ships more smartphones than the US companies combined.
Apps? Are these like ‘applications’ or are they really mostly like content? I mean, for the iPad, are we talking about the SDK or HTML5 & CSS3? Or are they both the same? Where is the Linux in all this? What’s the answer, Jean-Louis? Nobody else seems to know.
“Ironically, Apple 2.0 wholeheartedly endorsed and licensed the PDF format.”
Actually PDF is an open format that is available free for any one to use. Apple use it in Mac OS X to create Quartz (“display PDF”) to replace the old NEXT display Postscript; which would of cost Apple a licence fee for every copy of Mac OS X sold.
Quartz is why all Mac apps can print to PDF.
Well reasoned article. I doubt very much though that “85% or more of all Web sites use Flash”.
If cross platform apps are so bad why doesn’t Apple stop distributing iTunes, QuickTime, Bonjour, MobileMe Control Panel App, and Safari for Windows? They are pretty lousy apps. They are large, often patched with overly large downloads, and perform poorly using large amounts of Windows system resources to do minimal things.
Steve Jobs/Apple is a case of “do as I say, not as I do.”
Seems to me this is a fundamental issue for most developers. A company that bans cross-platform development tools should have to live with that decision across the board. If IBM or Microsoft has done this, they would have been in serious legal trouble. Perhaps Adobe should ban use of cross-platform PDFs on any platform that restricts the use of cross-platform development tools. What’s fair for the goose…
This is a completely rational account of Apple’s motivation.
I agree with Steve Jobs and Apple on this account.
QUOTE (from Peter Cranstone): Here’s the hiccup. Nobody can build a sustainable business off the iPhone/iPad platform. Can’t be done while Apple insists on all the revenue.
RESPONSE: That is patently false. People can build a sustainable business off the iPhone/iPad platform. Apple gets 30%, the developer gets 70% of the revenue – a substantial amount. The profitability of the iPhone platform is such that developers are clamoring to make iPhone apps. This is why the platform has more apps than any other platform. This is also why more than 60% of apps for the iPhone are paid-apps, while the opposite is true of the Android platform (where only 30% of apps are paid-apps). Large companies, such as some game companies, are finding that their iPhone apps end up being their most profitable projects compared to the apps they make on other platforms.
@James – Examples please. Also you might want to read this: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/02/17/app-is-crap-why-apple-is-bad-for-your-health/
Jean-Louis, can you explain how apps like Madden NFL fit into this new license scheme? Does an app like this heighten the iPhone platform’s advantages? Does it make excellent use of the iPhoneOS interface? I would say not, it’s comes up with a completely different scheme that looks somewhat like the Nintendo DS.
http://www.iphonebuzz.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/maddeniphone.jpg
Apple is certainly happy to have EA titles in the store. In fact EA was invited onstage in the iPhoneOS 3 preview to show off The Sims.
Some or most of the games are coded, I understand, on the Unity engine. So I assume EA should be given notice to shape up or ship out, like Adobe’s Flash- and Air-based platforms, right? I don’t know what coding platform Gameloft uses but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was Unity or something like it. Is Apple really going to tell EA and GameLoft to follow up and ignore the rest of the mobile market? Or is Apple simply going to not pursue their new license terms with them? Perhaps’s Apple’s lawyers will insert an exception for games in the license.
> To make sure the fonts got industry-wide adoption, Apple licensed the TrueType technology to Microsoft for free. The business model wasn’t font revenue but Adobe license fee avoidance.
It is correct that from management’s point of view cost was the consideration.
It is incorrect to imply that cost was the only consideration. Whether looking to the Unicode Proposal of 1988, to what was stated at WWDC in May 1989, to what was stated by Gable and Myhrvold at Seybold in September 1989, to what was stated by Jonathan Seybold in May 1992, to what is stated in the TrueType Specification or to what is stated in the TrueType Open (now OpenType) Specification, substitution in glyph space is the second consideration. If you set Apple’s annual financial accounts statement with tabular numbers using the Apple Typography Palette (the interface to glyph substitution) as described in the Apple Pages User Guide (all versions), you cannot search for the figures. At the introduction of Apple iWork, Steven Jobs stated that substitution (advanced typography) was supported, and at the same time stated that Apple Spotlight supplied system level search including search of PDF. Apple does not in fact use Apple software for Apple documentation, and if Apple did then Apple documentation would be unusable.The trouble is that Apple does not tell the user this.
Henrik
Jean-Louis
Thanks for posting this.
Many seem to want to paint this as some sort of good vs evil battle – but you’ve done a great job of outlining the conflicting business interests of the two companies.
Apple has made controversial decision after controversial decision with the iPhone, but the innovation and vibrancy of the iPhone platform are because of these decisions, not in spite of them.
Jim
Justifying by saying that this makes business sense for Apple is almost like saying that the bankers paying themselves big bonuses makes sense for them. As for Apple justifying by saying cross platform tools produce crappy products, well let the market decide. If they are crappy, they wont sell, and the developer will change the model.
I can’t even image what would have happened if Microsoft had done something like this.
With all due respect, this article illustrates the archaic thinking that Jobs is operating under. Unfortunately, those that were there at that critical juncture of the late 80′s and early 90′s when Apple lost the platform wars the first time around spend their every waking moment reliving it in their minds, thinking about how they could have done things differently. Rather than confront the elephant in the room, they blame everyone else, the lazy developers, the heathen IT buyers, the evil monopolist Bill Gates, etc. It is perceived injustices of this past era that have inspired the revolutionary zeal by which Apple is operating today. When Apple or its supporters trot out this archaic propaganda of “cross-platform tools”, the faithful remember Guy Kawasaki’s old admonitions and clever witticisms of “port being a wine”. It’s that old time religion at the revival hall. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way anymore, it’s hypocritical, and it’s technically false. The Mac OSX of today and the derivative iPhone OS by extension sit on top of a larger cross-platform codebase than any other volume consumer commercial OS. Every major app on OSX, even those written by Apple such as Safari and iTunes, never mind the obvious examples like Firefox has some large set of cross-platform code in it. This is the case for many, many of the “native” iPhone applications. What changed between the crude cross-platform apps of the early 90′s and the apps of today? The primary issue was which code was being reused cross-platform. The early attempts of cross-platform libraries focused on the UI toolkit layers, the latter are more focused on the business logic, the stuff you can’t see. However, even in those cases, that’s still oversimplifying. Obviously, UI-centric cross-platform libraries like WebKit have also shown that reusing even the code closest to the screen across iPhones, Macs, Windows, and Linux can still deliver the best user experience on any platform, and the irony is that Apple themselves demonstrated this. This is all a way of saying that, if one is willing to squint just right and fight the battles of the past rather than those of today, that you can argue that cross-platform tools are the harbinger of platform irrelevancy, but it’s been proven by thousands of applications and none other than Apple themselves, that it’s a false argument from both technical grounds and from the actual business outcome. Apple is where they are today because they intelligently blended open, cross-platform code with unique proprietary technology at both the OS and application level. Their hubris is believing that only they can do such a thing. The final point is that, if you truly embrace and understand Apple’s logic and legalese rather than just parrot it, then this discussion is no longer about Flash, since by the letter of the new TOS and the spirit of what’s being argued here and elsewhere, “middleware” libraries even if written in objective-C, such as Cocos2d and used by one in three iPhone games, is disallowed. There is really no clean line where to enforce this doesn’t end up either killing all reusable third-party code libraries or that doesn’t leave a loophole that some version of the Flash Packager can’t make use of. Adobe could ultimately just open source the Flash Player and it would be just one more library developers would use, like Cocos2d or Three20, and before you say fine, ban them all, do a little research and see how many thousands of the existing iPhone apps would get banned by that logic.
The analysis of this issue has been lazy. Gruber has handed the Apple argument to bloggers and then bloggers simply reprint it.
First, there is NOTHING in the license agreement that prohibits cross-platform development. Lets read the relevant portion of 3.3.1 again:
“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”
Note, I can write a C++ game for Windows and then port it to the iPhone. No problem with that. I can write a horrible Ajax game that works on the web and submit it to the app store. Cross-platform development of the worst kind is still allowed.
What is not allowed is the use of tools. For example, my company has an in-house language we use to describe levels and maps and such. The level-designers build the level in that language, and we code gen from it for performance. That is no longer allowed. My level-designers must now write in C++ or we must intepret it.
Apple has cut its nose to spite its face. We’ve never made much money from the iPhone. It was/is an experiment, but it is one that ends now. I don’t mind a company imposing rules (you can tell me what language the code must be in when we submit it), but don’t dictate to me the means to get there. There’s simply not enough money in the iPhone App Store for me to give up this freedom.
It’s a fair analysis. Apple is making a strategic choice to try to control the platform. Very rational.
The problem is that in doing so, Apple is repeating its own history. The author is old enough to remember the 1980′s… but so am I. Once upon a time, Apple had the Mac and was years ahead of everyone in the PC industry. However, they were smart enough to realize that the “IBM compatible” industry had far superior economics due to scale. So Apple thought about allowing clones. They even convinced (deceived?) their hardware vendors (IBM, Motorola) that they were going to try to get massive market share for the Mac as a platform. If you don’t know the acronym CHRP, please pause now and look it up.
But Apple decided then to enforce as much control over the platform as they could. No one wanted to be IBM… who had already lost control of “IBM compatible” to Intel and Microsoft! Apple started suing people. They sued the clone makers they were supposedly leveraging for platform market share. They sued Microsoft for the temerity of including a Trashcan icon. And they started competing with their independent developers — the author of this article points out an instance himself. Developers then made the business decision to go with the volume winner — IBM compatible — and Apple became highly dysfunctional.
Flash forward and the parallels are striking. iPhone is Mac… years ahead when it was introduced. But business users have kept other platforms (particularly Blackberry). Further, other platforms have better manufacturing economics and Android is rapidly becoming “good enough” just as Windows did. (Is Android 2.1 the Windows 3.1 of yore?) And Apple is making the same sorts of moves in the market against developers.
Steve Jobs’ 34 years in the computer industry ensure that he knows this history. Apparently, however, those 34 years have not given him the wisdom to avoid repeating it. The feud with Adobe is not a feud: it’s simple, rational business logic by both sides. There I agree with the author. But we’ve seen this story before… and Apple did not win.
And to add one more thing… I think with the current language, Apple will see that top tier games will no longer exist on the platform. The only games that are 100% in the set of described language are effectively “Flash” games (games that look like they were written in Flash, because they were done by one or two devs). Top-tier games from studios like EA and Activision almost certainly make use of custom languages (or languages like Ruby, Python, or Lua). The iPhone app store already looks like a collection of Flash games, with a few stars. It will be interesting to see the stars disappear when they realize that Apple just made their development of core assets 20x more difficult — for no technical reason (if there was a technical reason then I think studios would be more willing to shift resources).
And again, I think you’ll see the money just isn’t there to justify it. It makes sense for Joe Saturday to write a game in his weekends, but it will be harder to get Take Two to do a really good GTA port when everything has to be in C++.
@Dan, I disagree. The licensing language is only rational if you think the app store is so strong that developers won’t leave due to it. Or those developers that do leave aren’t beneficial. I think Apple will be surprised on both counts.
I don’t think Apple has played through all of the scenarios and I think they once again have underestimated the importance of the developer community. And I think they are overplaying how much of a head start they have. All of these things I think contribute to Apple making an irrational decision here. And frankly, this isn’t inconsistent at all about what I hear from people that have worked with Steve. He’s brilliaint and passionate, but also vindicative and tempermental.
I guess we’ll have to look back in three years and see the market share numbers then.
JLG— I loved the BeOS. What a ride! I still have a BeBox that one of your evangelists sent me blinking its lights in my office closet.
You make a very good case from Apple’s point of view, but to the end-user, it is not the only point of view that matters. In fact, it isn’t even the most important one. The problem I have as a developer is that my customer base, on the whole, isn’t going to pick one platform, whether it be on the desktop, in their pockets, or eventually, in their man-purses. They will want to take their data from one and access it with a familiar app on another. Perhaps they have a Windows 7 laptop and an iPad. Or a MacBook Pro and an Android phone. My job is to tie as many of those together as I can on an ongoing basis.
This is where cross-platform frameworks and very conservative adoption of platform-specific standards comes in. If I code everything for each platform from scratch, I n-tuple my development costs and lose a key quality tool. That is catching bugs cheaply on one platform build that would be difficult to see or much more costly to fix in isolation on another platform build. I found an immediate increase in overall quality of my wares when I decided to go for the “straddler” market, who might use Macs at home and Windows at the office. And I regularly can find and repair (or even avoid) bugs as I described entirely due to my cross-platform focus.
Ultimately, my customers in education care about my product. It is my product they integrate into their curriculums and classroom activities. By having equivalent Mac/Windows versions of the software, and web support on most mobile devices, my customers can also withstand shifts in buying habits (Mac v. PC) without much inconvenience, certainly without losing their data. And since I don’t have to focus on the underlying cross-platform framework and tool chain, I can focus on making a high-quality product my customers love.
It’s a high risk game that Apple is playing now. If they get a reputation as being expensive to target, or versions of cross-platform software trail on their platforms, they’ll be right back where they were in 1996 when they should have bought Be instead of NeXT
.
Customers want the following;
One Platform
One Interface
Multiple Data sets (for context)
Only one way to pull this off on ALL platforms and that’s to use the browser and the Internet. Web apps lower the cost, time to market and risk for the Enterprise.
What Apple just did is segment the development marketplace. Now I have to have two teams no matter what. That up’s my costs.
The argument for RIA (Rich Internet Applications) is a simple one. They can access the device side capabilities and the browser can’t. Well that problem (device side access for web apps via the browser) has been solved.
Authors assumption is that a cross-platform app is going to be diminished if it does not use features outside the Venn diagram intersection. Pretty strong assumption. If I have a app that runs great with features in the intersection, and Android, WinMo7, Mac Desktop, Win Desktop, Linux Desktop can all run AIR apps, then I have to do a full rewrite just for iPad because of Apple’s position. If there is a critical need for an ‘outside intersection” feature, then I can decide to recode, or perhaps market a lower-featured iPhone app. Options are incredibly important for developers to make optimal investment decisions. Note how absurd this is to take away options for developers.
Currently developers write for iPad/iPhone because that is where the largest, best organized market is. Jobs wants all the cool apps to come out for iPad/iPhone first, with the recode penalty for getting onto all the other applications. He hopes this is a big enough hurdle to keep cool apps off the other platforms.
However, every AIR developer in the world (of which I am one) hopes this situation gets turned around: developers will do AIR apps first because the installed based that runs AIR is much larger than iPad/iPhone. EVERY DEVELOPER IN THE WORLD NOW WANTS THIS (perhaps excluding some irrational fanbois). Step two is to look at the cost/payback decision for the iPad/iPhone recode.
I’ve loved Apple for a long time. Use only Apple products. I use AIR because it is a pretty damn cool product, and there are some great current products built with it. I’ve always wanted Apple to do brilliant things to increase their market share. However, as of this new section in iPhone OS 4, I have completely, 100% reversed. I desperately want Android and WinMo7 (come on MSFT, support both AIR and Silverlight with it) to eclipse Apple’s mobile market share. Once that happens, you would see Apple drop this paragraphs like the proverbial hot potato.
Is it a good idea for Jobs/Apple to reverse every developer’s attitude around like this? To make us root for the other guys? This is an incredible bet by Apple that they can stay number one for developers despite because of market size. Because of the forced second investment decision, and the desire every developer now has to want iPad/iPhone to drop to number two in market share, once the combined AIR mobile platform starts getting close, Apple will find a lot of foes trying to force it into the number two slot. From this point forward, Apple also has a formidable issue with its brand within the developer community.
Man, they better win their bet. Any and all posts justifying Apple’s position suggesting anything other than a market leader trying to maximize its profits doing quasi-monopolist stunts like this last one is absurd. (BTW: Think this is day 20 or so of Opera being kept out of the iPhone store.)
@Steve. Your argument is valid – get AIR to run on everything, problem solved. Only one problem, AIR doesn’t run on everything and never will. So I’m back to square one. Dependent on Adobe for improvements to the platform (Steve doesn’t want that) or the OEM’s to support someone else’s platform (OEM’s don’t want that).
Only place left is the Internet. Only issue is that the browser/web app can’t access device side capabilities like the RIA’s can. Well solve that problem.
@ken Actually, I believe we agree. When I say that Apple’s decisions are very rational, I mean that they are very rational within the context of Apple’s thinking: that they want only loyal, Apple-only developers because that maintains the uniqueness of the iPhone and the brand. However, I think you will agree that this is not rational in the larger context: unique does not equate to best, or to best value, or to best business for developers. And I strongly agree with you that, therefore, developers will leave in droves. But, hey, within the bubble of the RDF, they are rational.
The definitive blog on the Apple Developer contreversy.
Ever since DEC Rainbow lost by controlling the platform and IBM PC won by (relatively) more open philosophy, I figured that making sure everyone had your permission was a loser’s game. Steve Jobs has shown me the folly of my ways in that the sales power of the platform trumps every “who does what to whom” argument.
Thank you Jean-Louis.
Good analysis. It points out that Adobe and Apple are drifting apart, perhaps completely. It makes it really hard to want to invest in CS5 if you are an Apple hardware user.
I intend to download a trial of Aperture this week and see if it can replace Photoshop. Yeah, I’ll miss a few neat new features, but at least I know it will work with my Macs.
tom
Because users are inherently stupid it’s important to prevent them from accessing crappy apps by legal means.
Uh, if Flash or Java or any other type of apps suck, isn’t there a chance people won’t want them? Problem solved in the marketplace, where it should be.
Steve and his acolytes are scared crapless by competition, hence the pitiful legal maneuvers.
Apple is clearly playing the cards to its advantage. Some companies and many developers will get hurt, but that is not necessarily Apple’s problem.
Apple is a consumer electronics device maker and as such it has to make sure its devices are highly differentiated. Apple has chosen (as is very apparent from its marketing) to differentiate the iPhone with its unique application catalog. Adobe’s Flash Platform is in conflict with this objective. Note the tagline of Adobe’s Open Screen Project (launched by the team I lead when I was at Adobe):
“Singular Experience, Multiple Devices”
This is clearly not what Apple wants.
I wrote more about this here:
“Why Steve Jobs will Never Put Adobe Flash on iPhone OS Devices”
http://bit.ly/aXvvXU
Note also in the comment thread the discussion about why Apple is supporting HTML5 when in fact HTML5 also tends to hurt differentiation of its devices.
“The only developers slapped in the face are those who don’t use Apple development tools because they want to write a cross-platform app that may or may not use the particular features of the iPhone OS”
Absolutely false. I have seriously considered writing an iPhone (only) native compiler, using only the public iPhone API. Yes, I’ve written compilers before. They’re not really that hard, especially on such a standardized platform.
I mean, come on. It’s 2010. We’re living in the future. Who really wants to write in C still, or some thin layer of syntactic sugar on top of C? Apple’s vision of the future of computing is gorgeous hardware and user interfaces, and software architectures that weren’t even state-of-the-art in 1979. (Google for “And they showed me really three things”.) The guys at Xerox showed him Smalltalk, but he didn’t get it then, and still doesn’t.
I guess I’ll have to keep writing for the web. It’s not as nice as native development, but it’s probably for the best. But it also defeats the point of Steve’s plan, if that’s what this is: I’m helping people to write generic software, instead of software optimized for the iPad.
Man, how many dumb bloggers is Apple paying to write this BS? Ignorance is Strength! Freedom is Slavery! Stop telling me black is white and a closed, dictatorial environment is better than an open one. Its not true. It will never be true. This system will implode in five years time and Apple will fall like MS and IBM.
Is Jobs afraid that cross-platform apps (e.g. Flash or Corona) will compete successfully with native iPhone/iPad apps? If the cross-platforms apps are not as “native” or full-featured as the native apps, won’t users choose the apps that meets _their_ needs? Plus, Apple makes money of every app sale, regardless of the implementation technology.
I’m pro-choice on apps.
And as for “quality control”, the App Store is already full of crappy native apps.
.
“Crappy apps: no Flash required!”
I know about Acrobat and Reader which are very bloated. Adobe has monopoly on Web Video and Web animation. They are even putting Flash in Acrobat. Flash is not a standard, not free and it takes up battery. They want to put this everywhere so that it is difficult to get rid of. Why doesn’t it focus on HTML5 tools ? It is illogical (cry baby) for Adobe to say that Apple is NOT an open platform. Apple is recommending HTML5 which is an industry standard. They charge $2000 for creative suite and you have to upgrade every 2 years. You have to buy Flash servers. Java never worked to develop crossplatform User Interface. Adobe itself was aware of it when they started AIR. But Kevin Lynch wanted to use Flash install base and rub AIR also on us. These are not industry standards. It is for trying to monopolize an important part of Web. Apple is 100 % correct to fight this Flash Monopoly.
> It makes it really hard to want to invest in CS5 if you are an
> Apple hardware user.
> I intend to download a trial of Aperture this week and see if it
> can replace Photoshop.
These remarks are bizarre. CS5 will be hugely successful regardless of the iPhone (or even the current position of the planets). Also, Aperture (let alone Lightroom) are nowhere near replacements for Photoshop. If you’re satisified with what Aperture does for you and your images, you might have wasted your money on Photoshop (if you purchased that previously).
37signals has posted a good analysis of how Apple has messed up with their license change:
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2273-five-rational-arguments-against-apples-331-policy
I love how many people are suggesting ‘let the market decide’ – pass the pain and cost of this business battle onto the uninformed and ignorant customer. Great plan – I suspect none of you run a business. Even if one type of app finally wins out over the other, you have destroyed the good experience and trust of your customer base.
Now if ALL flash-originated apps were free for a year then the market test could be tried, with the pain borne by the confident developers. Happy to try that.
You’re an idiot. And your argument is stupid.
He’s limiting languages, not cross-platform tools.
I can have an iPhone specific framework, wrapping exactly what Apple provides in Objective-C, just in a different programming language… perhaps because I “think different” and this crazy megalomaniac fool will tell me “no! you can only use the tools provided by the central committee, you ungrateful developer”
And before you even think about answering me that this is the only clause that Jobs could put it that would stave off the DOJ from putting restraints on him, then think about the deeper meaning of that argument…
He’s doing something so unethical, that he must disguise his real intentions, and damage many more developers in the process, just so he doesn’t get shot down by the sheriff. That, sir, is the definition of Evil.
Besides, we all know that many games in the OS today embed a lua interpreter in them, will Apple remove ALL of them? Mind you those were not “legal” even before the new draconian party guidelines.
Someone should call Apple what they are: Monopolistic SOBs that need a reminder of what a 100 million dollar fines feels like.
oh my, yet another Apple-related post (on any blog) that generates tons of comments.
amazing.
I’m almost close to celebrate 5 years building interactive sites with Javascript (jquery) and PHP. That means that I only use Illustrator and Photoshop for my work. Dreamweaver, Flash? Those are useless tools: they only represent the lost intention of Adobe to become the lonesome provider of solutions. I’m eager to see when Flash is finally dead. Adobe… that’s what you get when innovation runs out.
“85% or more of all Web sites use Flash”
I find this assertion highly suspicious. Do you have any evidence of it ?
Reards,
S. Fermigier, Founder and Chairman, Nuxeo
Who cares how much Flash is on the web? How much Flash is on the web is annecdotal for the issue at hand.
The problem is restriction of alternative development platforms.
The author seems to have forgotten a piece of history that seems to be repeating itself. This same moves by Apple (Jobs) made the Macs a niche. Metaphorically speacking PC wise in the beginning there was DOS like OSes and they sucked, then Jobs said let there be a Mac with a GUI. And the GUI was good and everybody love it. Then in the 80s Apple decided to not allow Macs to be cloned. While the PC industry grew and flourished and Macs became a niche. M$FT took the GUI (Windows) and sold it to the PC industry and became a monopoly. While the Apple dwindle and almost went down. If it wasn’t because M$FT was in hot water with the DOJ for monopoly charges and strategically decided to infuse Apple with $150,000,000.00 plus port M$ Office to the Mac, and IE as well, today Apple’s story may have been different. Steve came back to Apple and just like he did before he innovated and created something totally awesome. But just like he did before he is leading his new baby into a niche. Just look at the news, everybody and their dog will be creating mobile platforms. Sounds familiar? Well, everybody loves Apple and it is there all alone protecting their turf while the Mobile industry has realized that Steve has done it again and will gather and partnered together and kick his butt again. It is one company against the industry. I don’t care how smart he thinks he is, his resources are limited to one company Apple. Remember that when the IPhone originally came out he didn’t even wanted to let other people develop for the IPhone. PERIOD. then someone made him see the light and he opened it up. But his attitude hasn’t changed, he is still protecting his turf and being mean to anyone who tries to get close. I think the mobile industry is in the same state the PC industry was in the early 80s. He who is able to unify the mobile industry to make them work together will come out the next M$FT. This move by Apple strikes me as a move in the opposite direction.
If Apple wants to restrict its market then it is going about it in the right way. Many Flash developers will have no choice but to focus their attentions on other platforms i.e. Android and Chrome – Apple is playing into Google’s hands.
Google’s OSs are open source so devices based on these will be cheaper, more open and therefore used by the vast majority of people. Apple will remain the Porsche (well let’s not get carried away), no the Audi of computer devices locked away behind its protected walls.
Most people are motivated in their consumer choices by price and what is free. If something does almost the same but is cheap/free then most people will have no economic choice and will go for the cheap option – you just cannot justify the extra expense when there are so many competing forces on your wallet.
Yes, the fanboys will stick with Apple. Less money to feed the kids with but who cares it’s an Apple.
Remember CompUSA? Circuit City? You went into these places and the Macs would be in the back and the pea-brained salespeople would steer you to a PC, so you could play the latest version of World of Warcraft or whatever. Thus, the Apple stores were born, where you can actually ENJOY shopping and find knowledgeable help.
Adobe is a lazy company. They should have understood that serious artists were never going to dump the Mac and put up with all the failings of Windows for time-sensitive production work. But, instead, their bean counters looked at gross market share numbers.
In tech, if you sleep, you weep. They had MANY years to get their act together and they did not. Now– it wouldn’t shock me if Apple wrote a Photoshop killer, just like they wrote a Lightroom killer, an Acrobat killer, and a Premiere killer. ALL the Apple products are much superior to the Adobe ones. ADBE will be chapter 11 in a few years– and they deserve it!
My compliments to Jean-Louis Gassée for providing a good description of the Adobe / Apple situation in terms that most reasonable people can understand. Sadly, many in this thread are incapable of understanding the obvious and insist on more various conspiracy theories, etc. If nothing else, it is amusing.
@Lena D: Why do you attribute quality control to “mood swings”?
@Peter Cranstone: Where does your statistical analysis come from? If Apple’s app store were not profitable for developers, why does the number of apps continue to increase and why are we seeing even greater investments into funds to support future development? Also, regarding number of phones sold by other vendors (Nokia I presume), do you care to share the revenue spent on apps for Nokia’s platform versus apps for the iPhone platform? No? Didn’t think so.
@Ward Mundy: You clearly don’t even have a vague grasp on the situation here. Comparing the iPhone market to the IBM / Microsoft market is absurd. Apple isn’t banning anything specifically running on their device, they are banning what they sell on their app store. Corporations can deploy whatever they want on their iPhones for example.
@Miguel Marcos: Nobody ever said an application couldn’t be ported to the iPhone. Therefore, your point is moot.
@Brad Hutchings: & @Steve: As a developer I can tell you that the developer’s point of view is even less important than Apple’s point of view. The customer’s point of view is essentially all that matters. Apple is protecting the customer’s user experience here. As a developer, you will write for the iPhone as long as it financially makes sense to. In terms of paid app sales, the iPhone is the only real mobile market right now and you know it. Regardless of unit sales of other devices, people are buying iPhone apps.
@Edwin: That’s not the way it works. Consumers will download an app and not know how it was developed. All they will know is that the app us sub par. Sure, the market will decide to some degree, but it’s not a good thing to flood the app with crappy apps based on Flash that couldn’t possibly make use of features like a truly native app could.
@Mark 2000: So, everyone who disagrees with you is ignorant? Good to know…
@Christopher: Yes, Jobs is afraid of the homogenization of app quality across platforms and for good reason. The average app on the iPhone is of a higher quality than the equivalent on Android for example and for a reason. Apple has done a better job of APIs and frameworks needed to create a great app. Read any review of even basic things like Twitter apps for example to illustrate this point. With that in mind, why on earth would Jobs / Apple want to level that playing field where they currently enjoy an advantage? Come on… let’s use a little common sense.
@Jonk: I’m glad to see that someone actually “gets it”. Some people seem to think it’s a good business plan to flood the market with very low quality applications then “let the market decide”.
Etc, etc….
@Steve – let me clarify my comments regarding developers. A handful are making money, the rest, nothing. Of the 185,000 apps, most people run between 5 and 7 and pay less than $3 for each, if they pay anything at all. So here’s my point – I very much doubt you will ever build a $50m a year business off the iPhone. Apple continues to siphon off every penny they can. Nothing wrong with that as JLG says – it’s just business. But remember it’s Steve’s business model and he went this way once before. From what I see history is about to repeat itself. Except this time it will be Google winning vs. Microsoft. Let’s face it – apart from higher prices there’s not a lot else to differentiate any more. And most people hate over paying unless their image conscious.
@Steve… As a cross-platform developer with a product that schools have used for going on 7 years, I’m actually the one protecting the user experience, not Apple. My customers change platform buying preferences (Mac, Windows) like the tides change their britches. What I offer them is a consistent experience with no data loss no matter what the purchasing people decide to do for the labs next year. Mobile technology is starting to make waves in this space, and I would like to offer support for Android tablets, iPads, and other mobile devices to those customers. I already offer iPhone optimized web displays of their documents. But outside the browser, I can’t do that without development tool support from my vendor of choice. They’ve expressed interest and taken steps toward eventually targeting iPhone and iPad. But they’ve been blocked just like Flash.
The point is… The platform vendors do not have a monopoly on guaranteeing positive end-user experience. They all used to understand their place. Apple no longer does.
@Brad – extremely well put. Apple wants to remove the oxygen from this space and leave the tidbits for those who still want to play. Right now it’s nuclear war in platforms. Everybody wants it to be there’s over someone else’s. That worked before we had the Internet. It won’t work twice. The future is smarter phones, smarter data plans and smarter browsers. Only the browser offers, One Platform, One Interface and Access to multiple data sets which can be used to drive relevance. By all means focus on the iPhone/iPad if that’s your core customer, but 5 years from now that will be just a quaint notion of what was once considered a good idea. By then everyone will be using the browser. It’s the One Ring that binds them all, only problem is that it can’t interact with the device capabilities but that will be solved by then.
@Steve: How refreshing to have a self-professed genius in our midst. Some of the best games on the iPhone were developed with cross-platform development tools. Do a little research before spouting any more nonsense.
A spot-on analysis – thanks for this Jean-Louis
Even with 100 million devices on the platform, almost NONE of the applications out there make back enough to support their development. And almost 100% of those that do, use third party toolkits.
Without these toolkits you don’t have to worry about apps that do not need and can not use special Apple features, not using these features. They will simply not exist, in some cases not on the iPhone, and in many cases not at all (because without the iPhone they’re not viable anyway).
In many cases if Apple add a new feature, then the toolkits support that feature, all developers need to do in order to take advantage of it is recompile. If every developer had to go back and hand code to take advantage of it, they simply wouldn’t, because there is 0 incentive for them to do so.
These apps are not terrible apps, Jobs himself has showed them off in keynotes. The iPhone platform simply wouldn’t have had the level of success it has had without them. People are paying serious money for MonoTouch or Unity and would have for Adobe’s tools, because gaining specialist skills for the platform is significantly more expensive and restrictive. Apple’s motivation here is not at all application quality, but ensuring that applications written for their platform can not be easily be ported to other platforms when it becomes obvious that they will be larger.
I can understand now allowing interpreted code, I can understand if Apple decide they want to enforce performance benchmarks to prevent crappy code. But banning code which is compiled into exactly the same language as code written from scratch, has no advantage what-so-ever. If the code compiles into native code, there’s nothing (other than this agreement) stopping developers from using their toolkits and THEN spending the little time it would take to tweak it for the iPhone if there was a missing feature. As it stands there is now literally no way for people to update the tens of thousands of applications written this way, so the platform will begin dating immediately.
Another excellent analysis of Apple’s penitentiary vision and its repercussions:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/the-ipad-isnt-a-computer-its-a.html
@Rod Rye – very well put.
Something else to noodle. Let’s play VC for a moment. One thing that you always get asked when presenting to a VC is what are the accelerators to your business, what are the limiters and what are the dependancies? So you’ve come up with this incredible idea, it’s called Flash. Does some really cool things and runs on the iPhone, iTouch and iPad. VC says great. Now what can derail you? Well a No from the iStore would be one, a change in the developers SDK legal agreement would be a second. VC stops to think for about a pico second and says we’ll wait and see what happens, thanks for the meeting.
Nothing chills a meeting faster than your plan depends on a Yes from a single entity. What Apple (Steve) keeps doing is changing the playing field. Nothing wrong with that from Steve’s perspective, he needs to keep the shareholders happy with a stock price that climbs. However the VC takes a look and says, heck I’m basically betting the LP’s money that Apple will allow us on their “Deck”.
And that really is the core issue here (IMHO). Developers can code around just about anything but a legal document. That’s what just sent not only a chilling message through the developer community but also the investment community. Sure KP just doubled down on the iFund but I can almost guarantee you that whatever app they invest on absolutely runs cross platform or is tied to a service that generates transactional revenue. No way you can place a bet where a single NO can derail you entire investment.
Awesome stuff (article and comments)! On a side note, I think that this statement ““85% or more of all Web sites use Flash” applies to the Flash plugin.
so many of these comments are missing the point. the point is that apple doesn’t want to end up beholden to adobe or any other company when it comes to the development of their platform. here’s the scenario:
flash developers can create apps and compile them for iphone os, so the do. in droves. eventually, the app store is flooded with them. they’re mostly crapware and toys that users quickly lose interest in, but there are *a lot* of them. and there are even some that become important to subsets of users in certain fields.
now, apple decides to introduce some major new features to iphone os, that it believes will keep their platform on top, and deliver great stuff that users really want. but wait! apple has to go to adobe and say, “how soon can you get your compiler updated to offer these apis and then get the word out? these are some great features and we really want to get this release out the door.” because apple doesn’t want to roll out this new version, which will get very fast and widespread adoption, and then have huge numbers of users wondering why their apps are broken or can’t do the new whiz-bang stuff that apple bragged about in this shiny new os release. so apple is at the mercy of adobe (or whichever cross-platform compiler vendor) to determine which new features it’s safe to roll out. and if they ignore adobe then they risk pissing of their customers. apple *does not want to piss of its customers*. that is bad bad bad. these are the people who actually buy the vast majority of the products, and don’t care *at all* if the app was written flash or obj-c or lua or fingerpaint. they just want it to work and deliver all the goodies apple promised.
so apple’s approach makes sense. is it the only approach that would allow them to avoid this problem? no. is it the best? i don’t kow. reasonable people can argue that apple is exercising too much control, or sacrificing the possibility of lots of great stuff being created, or risking losing developers, or whatever. but you can’t argue that the risk isn’t real. this stuff has happened lots in tech, and it’s happened to apple. i think in jobs’ experience, companies such as adobe are not reliable partners, and being at their mercy is way too dangerous.
make sense now?
@Steve (#2) — I see you did not address my criticisms, but you did challenge my analogy to the PC industry of the 80′s, so I will offer you a sub-case which I guarantee I’ve got good information on. Bear with me — it’s hardware.
Early in the 2000′s, IBM was bidding for four microprocessor developments: Wii, Xbox II (now Xbox360), PS3, and Mac G6. The first three were to be either paid developments (with a break on the unit cost) or enough volume at reasonable margins to cover the development. IBM won all three of those, including the volumes that the game console market generates. The fourth deal was to have very low margins and no NRE… justified (by Apple) by the idea that the microprocessor would have wide applicability and that, therefore, IBM could sell a lot of them to others at good margins.
Unfortunately, Apple’s case did not hold water. Wide applicability requires general requirements and the history of G5 showed that Apple-specific requirements would trump this. (You’ll note that even IBM blade servers, which have power constraints, switched from PowerPC G5 to POWER. Why? Because Apple’s requirements hamstrung the G5 as a server processor.) Alternatively, wide applicability requires a Mac clone market… and IBM had been duped by Apple on this idea once before. (Read up on CHRP.) Therefore, IBM was not going to buy the “you’ll make it up in volume” argument. And Apple’s volumes were insufficient to make up the development cost, given the low margins. There was no business case to make a deal: both IBM and Apple knew it.
Then Steve himself showed his true colors. He’s a smart guy and he knew this day was coming: he’d been working on x86 all along. I give him points for that. But it was mean-spirited to then blame this on some failure of IBM’s technology — it was Apple’s own moves in making the Mac a niche (with niche volumes), in screwing IBM in the past, and in simple greed by not allowing sufficient margins for his “partner” that made the move to x86 a self-fulfilling prophesy. The proof is that Steve then hired IBM’s processor manager, Mark Papermaster. I am not saying IBM is blameless… simply that Steve’s stated reason for the switch was both far from the truth and mean-spirited.
App developers now face the same problem, although at roughly two orders of magnitude fewer dollars. There are thinned margins through the iPhone store, there’s no wide applicability if they can’t use cross-platform tools, and there’s a company with a known history of capriciousness, deceptiveness and mean-spiritedness. Some, like IBM, will turn away from a bad deal. If they are big enough, my guess is that “the Steve” might even blame them publicly for their failure of faith.
Others, like you, will keep the faith. I wish you the 72 virgins or eternal salvation or whatever your faith says you’ll get by martyring yourself for Apple’s benefit.
The truth of the matter is that as a consumer (and a former mac dev), I have never really used a cross platform app that didn’t suck on at least one of the platforms. Everyone remember Word 6.0 for Mac? That thing was a travesty and it didn’t use native toolsets. Not great for the user.
If you want true fidelity across platforms, you should probably make web apps. Dive into HTML5 and enjoy. But the more apps i use that refuse to use the cool OS features, the less likely i am to buy from that company again.
End users don’t care about this issue as much as developers do. They care in the sense that they get weird boxes on web sites because there is no flash, but as more people use iPhones/iPads and such, that will change as developers seek to please their customers. See also: Virgin Air.
> make sense now?
No.
> Everyone remember Word 6.0 for Mac
Word 5.1 was golden.
> But the more apps i use that refuse to use the cool OS features,
> the less likely i am to buy from that company again.
Thus the lack of sense in restricting coding platforms.
@Dan G – this has to be one of the most informative threads I’ve ever been on. Outstanding quality. In the end it always boils down to margin – it’s the lifeblood of any business. Apple is slowly but surely siphoning off the margin whilst pretending to offer more. History will repeat itself, except this time it will Google (not Microsoft) that steals the limelight. You don’t need 185,000 apps. You need your app to run everywhere with the least amount of friction. Apple is making that harder and harder. Eventually it breaks.
If adobe really wanted to get nasty with Apple they could simply by refusing to support apple with their graphics applications. Those programs are really the only reason most professional mac users made mac as their platform of choice. Would it hurt Adobe’s business, probably in the short term. it would however be devastating to Apple. Students, Semi-pros and industry alike would drop Apple like never before simply because they couldn’t get the latest version of photoshop. Add the other programs and Apple could forever kiss away most of their business, when users learn PC’s aren’t really as evil as Apple has made them out to be for decades.
This is an interesting blog post with some interesting points. However, it misses one important aspect that really renders most of the points invalid: This is NOT about cross-platform development! When a developer uses MonoTouch for instance, they are writing an iPhone-only app. Not a cross-platform app. They are using a language and an IDE they are already familiar with, but they are still writing a device-purposed app that can only run on that device and that can use every feature of that device. It is simply about leveraging existing skills (C# in my example) and some code. From everything I know about Adobe’s plans for Flash dev on iPhone, it’s the same deal. You couldn’t just use the iPhone to browse to a web page that has Flash on it (that would be a runtime issue, not a dev issue), but you can use ActionScript and such to build a native iPhone app. So with those facts in mind, how much of this blog post really makes a lot of sense?
BTW: Considering Apple’s stands on all things Blog and Social Media, it seems to me that criticizing someone for not wanting to be comment-spamed is a bit on the… well… let’s say “strange” side.
Apple has removed Scratch, an educational programming app based on Squeak, from the iTunes store. It’s an educational app. I get the feeling Apple is on a slash-and-burn mission. Absurd. Nothing but absurd.
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/apple-removes-scratch-from-ipadiphoneitouch/
@brad,
i won’t claim to speak for anyone but myself, but as a designer i can say that adobe has already lost a lot of my good will and loyalty. the way they’ve treated the mac os versions of their apps in recent years, as well as the feature bloat, high prices, and odd ui choices, has me (and a lot of other designers i know of) ready and willing to replace adobe apps with other options. unfortunately, the other options aren’t quite up to the job yet, at least for a lot of professional design tasks.
if adobe were to eliminate the mac versions of their cs apps i would do everything i could to stay on the mac and find alternatives. i would put up with a lot of pain in making that transition rather than switch to windows. i have no doubt that plenty of people would switch, but i was using a mac long before i was using adobe creative apps, and photoshop and illustrator are only two apps out of dozens that i use on a regular basis. it would even be conceivable to use the cs apps in a virtual machine, if performance were bearable.
beyond my own attitude, this would be hugely detrimental to adobe’s business, and there are a lot of people at adobe outside of the flash group that are big fans of the mac os. all-in-all, i think this would be a terrible move on adobe’s part, with the potential to hurt them more than hurt apple.
I’d be willing to shift from my Mac to a Windows machine now. Adobe – how about no longer investing in Apple, and devote the majority of your resources to windows. I’d shift.
according to your logic, no more cross platform.
Let adobe stop making CS5 for Mac, just focus on windows.
Jean-Louis Gassée is the “genius” who persuaded Steve Jobs in 1985 that nobody would ever catch up with the Mac interface, and that they should refuse to license MacOS to anyone else. Then he masterminded the development of the Macintosh Portable, a boat-anchor portable that nobody bought. Then he left Apple to form Be, and was the man behind the commercial failure that was BeOS. Then he turned down Apple’s offer to buy BeOS, selling it to Palm instead–where it was used for an Internet appliance that failed dismally. Then he became head of PalmSource, developing an OS for Palm devices that nobody wanted, not even Palm.
If Jean-Louis Gassée thinks Apple is doing the right thing, Jobs must be signing the iPhone platform’s death warrant…
OK paul, I disagree with JLG’s reasoning here too, but I am going to stick up for him on one point… Be, Inc. got passed over by Apple prior to the NeXT acquisition basically because Be’s engineers got caught with their pants down when asked about “the fragile base class problem”. What BeOS basically did was just reserve a little space for new fields and space for new functions in all it’s C++ class definitions. NeXT, OTOH went with the complete overkill of having an abstract object request broker. It’s one of the reasons why it then took the NeXTies another 3 years to ship Mac OS X and then another 2 years to really make it work. It’s also essentially one of the reasons Apple defenders are justifying the 3.3.1 term of the iPhone development contract. Be’s simple, elegant approach was really the best approach, but at the time, everyone wanted super complexity.
I think what JLG learned at Be was that the systems approach is expensive and makes you much less nimble. I would bet that if Apple would have bought Be and brought him in high level enough, that Apple would have been selling MacOS and BeOS and porting both to Intel. It certainly would not have inherited the smugness of Jobs, Tevanian, and company.
Ok Adobe is advocating using Flash to author apps and then porting over to iPhone OS.
Is this strategy similar to how once upon a time Adobe moved all their primary app development platform to Windows and then ported over their apps to MacOS?
This resulted in sub standard apps for MacOS like Premiere which performed better on Windows than on MacOS and Photoshop only getting native performance only after 10+ years of OSX.
If this is what happened before then I can understand why Apple is refusing to allow apps to be authored on Flash and other development tools and then ported over to iPhone OS….
Obviously natively written code is more efficient and optimized for the platform it is meant to run on. JMHO
Shridhan Automation is a Manufactures, Exporters & Suppliers a wide variety of Level switches, Level switches for liquids and Level Transmitters for liquids in India.
whew.. it’s getting hot in here
please calm down
love apple so much
great technology..
Thank you for the link
Apple just took the wind out of our sales again
whew.. it’s getting hot in here
Wow… thanks so much for your sharing…
this is so useful
thanks for the Subs, Share, and the knowledge…
Hi. I wanted to drop you a quick note to express my thanks. I have been following your blog for a month or so and have picked up a heap of good information as well as enjoyed the way you’ve structured your site. So I’ve gone and linked to your site (dofollow) from here: http://reviewedcentre.com/websites-that-i-like/
I’m late to read this blog…I didn’t come to know about the things that were going on between Apple and Adobe back in one year ago… Indeed, there are many profound comments in this post.
From all the sites I have been to covering this subject matter, I think you do that best at explaining it, so very well done my friend.
Great post! I agree that it seems without Adobe there would be no Macintosh. Thanks for sharing!
I agree! Thanks for sharing this, it was interesting to read
ubstantially the article is really the best on this laudable topic. I concur with your conclusions and will eagerly look forward to your future updates.
@ Peter – Only the browser offers, One Platform, One Interface and Access to multiple data sets which can be used to drive relevance. By all means focus on the iPhone/iPad if that’s your core customer, but 5 years from now that will be just a quaint notion of what was once considered a good idea.
thanks for sharing.I enjoy it.
Well the war is still going on…It is interesting to see how it will end. Will Apple or Adobe win this?
хронический холицестит. диетагречневая диета светик бусяможно ли похудеть занимаясь плаваниемпродукты способствующие похудению сибирская клетчаткасуши диета фигура калорйиность суш вредно ли для фигурыможно ли беременной сидеть на овощной диете 5 днейпреперат для снижения весарецепты диетических блюд в ккал для похудения для мужчинможно ли заменить в диете томатный сок на помидордиета девочки 13 лет склонной к полнотедиета аткинса и отзывысеминар по диетологииинформация о лишнем весейога-похудениедиета с низким содержанием жировлариса долина до и после похудениядиета похудения по методу маргариты королевойдиета для диабетиков 1типакак быстро похудеть реальносекрет красоты как похудеть кормящей матери
Very good article with reasons, but I like both of the things. Because both have some their own strengths
I agree! Thanks for sharing, it was interesting to read. Very good article with reasons, but I like both of the things. Because both have some their own strengths
Steve Jobs, oh my idol.
New Arrival Beats By Dr.Dre
Beats By Dr.Dre Studio
Beats By Dr.Dre Pro
Beats By Dr.Dre Solo
Justbeats Headphones
Diddybeats
Heartbeats
iBeats
Powerbeats
Tour
Special In-Ear Edition
Sepcial Over-Ear Edition
Monster Diddybeats Headphones High Performance In-Ear – White
Beats By Dr.Dre Studio Colorful Champagne Limited Edition
Dr.Dre Detox Special Limited Edition Professional Headphones
Dr Dre Beats Studio Ferrari Headphones Limited Edition – Yellow
Dr Dre Beats Studio Ferrari Headphones Limited Edition – All Red
Beats By Dr.Dre Tour Headphones with ControlTalk – Black
New Style Dr Dre Beats Graffiti Limited Edition Headphones White
Monster Beats Studio Headphones Michael Jackson Limited Edition
Monster Beats Studio Diamond Headphones Limited Edition -Red
Monster Beats Studio Diamond Headphones Limited Edition – White
Monster Beats LeBron James Headphones Dull Gold Limited Edition
Monster Beats LeBron James Headphones 23 Limited Edition
Monster Beats Lamborghini Studio Headphones Limited Edition
Monster Beats By Dr.Dre Solo hd Headphones – Graphite
Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Studio Red Sox Edition Headphones
Beats By Dr.Dre Studio Orange Limited Edition Headphones
Dr.Dre Beats Studio Limited Edition Headphones – Black-Yellow
Dr.Dre Beats Studio Limited Edition Headphones – Black-Yellow
Discount Monster Beats Studio Limited Headphones – Purple
Discount Monster Beats Studio Limited Edition Headphones – Blue
Discount Dr.Dre Beats Studio Headphones Limited Edition – Red
Discount Dr Dre Beats Studio Limited Headphones – Champange
Discount Dr Dre Beats Studio Headphones Limited Edition – Pink
Discount Beats by Dre Studio High-Definition Headphones – Black
Discount Beats By Dre Studio Headphones High-Definition – White
Beats By Dr.Dre Studio Orange Limited Edition Headphones
Beats By Dr.Dre Studio Colorful Champagne Limited Edition
Monster Beats Studio Diamond Headphones Limited Edition -Red
Monster Beats Studio Diamond Headphones Limited Edition – White
Monster Beats By Dr.Dre Solo hd Headphones – Graphite
Dr.Dre Detox Special Limited Edition Professional Headphones
Dr.Dre Detox Special Limited Edition Professional Headphones
Monster Beats Pro Headphones Performance Professional (black)
Beats By Dr.Dre Miles Davis Tribute In-Ear Speaker
Dr Dre Beats Solo Headphones On-ear with ControlTalk (white)
Dr Dre Beats Solo Headphones On-ear with ControlTalk (black)
Monster Beats Pro Headphones Performance Professional (white)
Monster Beats Lamborghini Studio Headphones Limited Edition
Monster Beats By Dr.Dre Solo hd Headphones – Graphite
Discount Beats By Dr.Dre Studio Kobe Bryant Limited Headphones
Beats Graffiti Limited Headphones with Fire and Character-Red
Discount Monster Lil’Jamz High-Performance In-Ear Headphones
Discount Monster Beats By Dr.Dre Turbine In-Ear Headphones
Discount Beats By Dr.Dre Turbine Pro In-Ear Headphones – Golden
Monster Turbine Pro Headphones Professional In-Ear – Copper
Discount Monster Beats Butterfly by Vivienne Tam Headphones
Beats By Dr.Dre Tour Headphones with ControlTalk – Yellow
Beats By Dr.Dre Tour Headphones with ControlTalk – White
Discount Beats By Dr.Dre Solo HD On-Ear Headphones – Black
Discount Beats By Dr.Dre Solo HD On-Ear Headphones – White
Discount Monster PowerBeats Sport-In Ear Headphones – White
Discount Monster PowerBeats Sport-In Ear Headphones – Red
Monster Beats Miles Davis Tribute High Performance In-Ear Speake
iBeats Headphones with ControlTalk From Monster(white)
iBeats Headphones with ControlTalk From Monster(chrome)
iBeats Headphones with ControlTalk From Monster(black aluminum)
Lady Gaga Heartbeats Headphones High Performance – Rose Red
Lady Gaga Heartbeats Headphones High Performance – Bright Chrome
Lady Gaga Heartbeats Headphones High Performance – Black Chrome
Monster Diddybeats Headphones High Performance In-Ear – Pink
Monster Diddybeats Headphones High Performance In-Ear – Black
JustBeats Studio Headphones Purple Signature Edition
JustBeats Solo Purple Headphones On-ear with ControlTalk
iBeats Bieber Limited Edition Justin Headphones with ControlTalk
Beats By Dr.Dre Tour Headphones with ControlTalk – Purple
Great post! I agree that it seems without Adobe there would be no Macintosh. Thanks for sharing!
Very good article with reasons, but I like both of the things. Because both have some their own strengths
Very good article with reasons, but I like both of the things. Because both have some their own strengths
One again, Keep working. Thanks. . .
Is your carpet wrinkled, we can fix you carpets by using a power stretcher.
“My 2 1/4 cylinder is just a little too big on the shaft but now the elliptical cylinder has solved the problem. I use the 1 3/4 X 2 1/4 and the sensation is absolutely wonderful. Thanks for always finding ways to improve. I am one very satisfied customer.”
Duane, from Arizona
“My 2 1/4 cylinder is just a little too big on the shaft but now the elliptical cylinder has solved the problem. I use the 1 3/4 X 2 1/4 and the sensation is absolutely wonderful. Thanks for always finding ways to improve. I am one very satisfied customer.”
Duane, from Arizona
Thanks for sharing this great article! That is very interesting I love reading and I am always searching for informative information like this.
rite like this too. You need time to creat that interesting and additionally real effort to make such a good article
Used for Microsoft Office 2007 download knows that the software bulky, so you can take some of theintermediate target Green-free installation software, the easiest way is to direct Office 2007 download virtual system version. Microsoft Office 2010 download new interface simple and clean, but also to identify the whole orange. Microsoft Office 2010 will use the new Ribboninterface themes, due to the increasing functionality of the program, specifically for Office 2010 download Microsoft developed the interface.
I remember macromedia flash in the early days. It ran well on dial-up and provided content that made the user beg for more. Back then Apple for me was in obscurity, I had used the odd machine, and I did think they were odd, although I did not have any specific requirement for them, the graphic designer however did.
I like cross-platform and do not think it has to mean the degradation of identity of any one individual platform. If your platform has something to offer over the others then let people know that, but don’t be afraid of best practice. Macromedia developed a best practice in the development of animated media, like it or not it is here to stay.
That said, if Apple will not budge, then as you say, web developers and such like will have no alternative but to adapt in order to support this ever increasing monopoly of iOS devices.
Great topic, keep myself through looking it.
Компания As-stone предлагает гранит, оникс, мрамор высшего качества. Наши специалисты закупают оникс, гранит и мрамор на лучших карьерах Италии, Бразилии, Испании, Африки .
. “Ognuno ha imparato Realizza 猫 consapevole del fatto che”, insieme a e inoltre http://www.balenciaga-borse.com
http://www.ugg4ever.com/ Replica Ugg Boots
This is a great tip especially to those new to the blogosphere.
Brief but very accurate information… Appreciate your sharing this one.
A must read article!
Hey there! This is my first visit to your blog!
We are a group of volunteers and starting a new project in a community in the same niche.
Your blog provided us beneficial information to work on.
You have done a outstanding job!
Appreciating the hard work you put into your site and in depth
information you offer. It’s awesome to come across a blog every once in a while that isn’t the same old rehashed material.
Wonderful read! I’ve bookmarked your site and I’m including your RSS feeds to my Google account.
These backpacks come in three different chenille animals – elephant,
lion, or bear. 98. Lessen your Carbon Impact: Travel, Purchasing
& Holiday Cards – Minimizing the co2 presence
is probably the very best actions during the holidays –especially with all the current vacation along with time you generally devote within vehicles,
educates or aircraft.
I’m not that much of a online reader to be honest but your blogs really nice,
keep it up! I’ll go ahead and bookmark your site to come back down the road. Cheers
Your write-up provides confirmed helpful to myself. It’s very useful and you’re clearly extremely knowledgeable of this type. You get popped my eye in order to different views on this specific subject with intriquing, notable and sound content.
Cie – Aura’s energies interact with the body’s vibrational system to move
your body to its optimum vibrational level and achieve desired results.
As an example, it’s been demonstrated that Stevia may perhaps boost moods and raise energy ranges and mental alertness. It being with milk and without sugar that Juan drank coffee.
32 Trackbacks
[...] devices using Adobe’s upcoming Unity tool, a few heavyweights such as John Gruber and Jean-Louis Gassé both chime in, claiming it is a strategic move by Apple to control the developer [...]
[...] April 12, 2010 · Leave a Comment Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future via mondaynote.com [...]
[...] leap that Gruber—and Jean-Louis Gassé, in a piece that just came out this morning—make from realizing the §3.3.1 is about lock-in to claiming that cross-developed applications [...]
[...] The Adobe – Apple Flame War # / KOMENTARI /0/ DODAJ KOMENTAR [...]
[...] from mondaynote. I don’t use Apple products, but i start to understand the mentality. And maybe Microsoft should start a partnership with Intel and a few more and start delivering hardware and software products in the same case. You know, those kind of products that are design for the hardware they run on and are working so good the Blue Screen of Death will be a distant memory. Tags: adobe, apple, dot com, hardware, software Comment (RSS) | Trackback [...]
[...] The Adobe – Apple Flame War – Monday NoteAn overview by Jean-Louis Gassée, basically from the Apple point of view. (At Apple, Gassée saved the Mac by creating the Mac II, then founded Be Inc, which could have been the basis for Mac OS X.) [...]
[...] The Adobe – Apple Flame War | Monday Note (tags: adobe apple flash) [...]
[...] gets green-lighted Losing differentiation is death by low margins April 13, 2010 Jean Louis Gassee via DF: Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform [...]
[...] 12 April 2010: Jean-Louis Gassée gets it, which is kind of cool for me because when I worked at NeXT I remember visiting Be for [...]
[...] Jean-Louis Gassée has a great summary of the feud between Adobe and Apple. He should know, as he was an Apple executive during the 90s. [...]
[...] Original source : http://www.mondaynote.com/2010/04/11/the-adobe-app… [...]
[...] Jean-Louis Gassée: Let’s perform a thought experiment. By the end of 2010, there will be more than 100 million iPhone OS devices (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad). You’re the webmeister at an important content site. The boss comes in and asks you why you’re not supporting the iPhone OS devices. ‘Our stuff is all Flash-based, chief, those guys don’t run Flash’. You’re about to become the ex-webmeister. The boss, a really patient sort, asks you to “think different” about all these “non-compliant” customers, each of whom has an iTunes account backed by a credit card, and has developed the habit (encouraged by Apple) of paying for content. So, one more time, with feeling: What’s your answer? [...]
[...] bs, flash, gruber, html5, java, nonsense, standards, strawmen by Martin Graney John Gruber and some others are inferring that the problems with Flash as cross-platform system are the same as the [...]
[...] for converting .NET applications to iPhone applications, but as Jean-Louis Gassée noted in a recent blog post, cross-platform tools “erase “uncommon” features.” I spent a lot of time learning Windows-specific [...]
[...] in a move to prove its critiques wrong. Or Apple drawing a line in the sand for developers and making cross-platform compiling impossible next to announcing iAd. Although the latter had its prequels. Namely the acquisition of Quattro [...]
[...] if you want to spoil the surprise. Their complaints about the product echo mine, but after reading JLG’s excellent piece, and thinking about it, I realize they didn’t get what Apple is doing, and neither did I. I mean I [...]
[...] : – Le point de vue de Jean-Louis Gassée (ex-DG d’Apple France et ancien VP d’Apple), dans ses Monday Notes ; – Un autre article-fleuve de Daniel Eran Dilger sur [...]
[...] is a good argument that Apple is doing this to preserve its uniqueness: it is unlikely that cross-platform apps will be as well integrated with the functions of a device [...]
[...] to see that an investigative article created by a new-fangled business model for journalism has been awarded a Pulitzer this year. Maybe journalism isn’t dead after [...]
[...] clearest explanation of WTF Apple is thinking is in this post (also thanks to Daring Fireball) from Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Apple’s ATG, and founder of Be [...]
[...] Jean-Louis Gassée on Monday Note Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Struggling iMac [...]
[...] entender a estratégia da Apple, eis uma belíssima análise do Monday Note Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform [...]
[...] Monday Note: The Adobe-Apple Flame War [...]
[...] via The Adobe – Apple Flame War | Monday Note. [...]
[...] via The Adobe – Apple Flame War | Monday Note. [...]
[...] Gassee, a former head of Macintosh development, phrased the Apple-vs.-Flash situation this way: “Steve Jobs has seen enough in his 34 years in the computer business to know, [...]
[...] apparent declaration of war on Adobe’s nearly ubiquitous Flash technology. We agree with Gassée in general. For clients this issue can affect campaigns targeting a mobile (Apple) audience. [...]
[...] The Adobe – Apple Flame War – Monday NoteAn overview by Jean-Louis Gassée, basically from the Apple point of view. (At Apple, Gassée saved the Mac by creating the Mac II, then founded Be Inc, which could have been the basis for Mac OS X.) [...]
[...] um problema técnico, é trivial de ser resolvida, é questão de tempo e força de trabalho. A falta de interoperabilidade política é a que foi colocada lá para defender interesses. Essa é que é um problema realmente [...]
[...] dysfunction drug review erectile dysfunction pschycological generic levitra mexico levitra and dog suscribe to mens health magazine dosage for levitra viagra and levitra risk mens fitness and health magazine injectable medication [...]
[...] Once again, third-party advertising networks seem to be the source of the problemThe Adobe – Apple Flame War – Monday NoteAn overview by Jean-Louis Gassée, basically from the Apple point of view. (At Apple, Gassée saved [...]
женский журнал…
[...]The Adobe – Apple Flame War | Monday Note[...]…