Category: mountaintop musings

Steve Jobs’ clean, methodical takedown of Flash.

Everything about Adobe these days is summed up by this basic point.

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe has been obsessed for the past decade with the idea of becoming a platform vendor, rather than a tool vendor. As a maker of tools in the desktop publishing era, they were fantastic, but once Acrobat became something more than a convenient printing format, and especially once they were infected by Macromedia, this ridiculous notion of Adobe as a platform, Acrobat, Creative Suite and Flash, gained ascendancy.

We are all poorer for it, because innovative nimble companies can’t get the market share and finance to directly compete with, for example, Photoshop; instead relying on crumbs by making low end, budget “recreational” visions of Adobe apps. I haven’t used CS5, but CS4’s primary characteristic is that it feels old, as in “take that old dog out behind the woodshed and shoot it”.

Evergreen stalwarts of mediocrity, Adobe are crying to momma because big bad apple won’t let them play in Apple’s sandpit:

“without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

As usual, Adobe have got it completely ass-backwards. Noone buys a Flash device. They buy an iPod, an iPhone or now an iPad, and they do it in ridiculous numbers. Flash not being on Apple’s devices has done exactly zero to harm sales and popularity of the device, and zero to harm the popularity and usable integrity of the platform.

Adobe’s statement would be better phrased as:

without iPhone OS suport, Flash developers and website designers will be unable to target the 100% of iPhone OS users, who represent the most financially lucrative consumer demographic. That’s why we’re falling over ourselves to salvage something with vapourware mutterings about CS5 producing “real” iPhone apps.

Oh, and while we’re talking about all those “great” flash sites, lets remember that when YouTube was faced with the opportunity of the iPhone, they went and rebuilt their entire system in h.264, and are now migrating to HTML5, Vimeo are going to HTML5, Zero Punctuation one of the web’s most popular video shows, has gone to h.264 (and the files are now about half the size of the Flash versions).

Cast your mind back to the start of the iPod, when everyone was declaring iPods to be the devil’s own product, and doomed to fail because it didn’t support .wma or .wmv or playsforsure or whatever Microsoft’s strategy of the nanosecond was. The vast majority of portable audio players supported MS’ formats, so all those poor Apple customers were being “locked out” of the “majority” of content.

Yeah, how did that work out? Anyone recall? Oh wait, Apple gouged out Microsoft’s brains and violated the corpse before playsforsure got knifed by Microsoft in favour of their next failsforsure effort, Zune.

If you want to be successful in a consumer category, you have to play in Apple’s sandpit, because noone else is capable of delivering a compelling consumer experience. The most hilarious, or perhaps pitiful aspect of this is that this situation isn’t a result of illegal, monopolistic or anti-competitive tactics by Apple, it’s just that almost everyone in the consumer electronics business actively sucks at the job in comparison.

Apple offers a manicured sandpit, your other options are craters of turned earth. Where do you want to play?

If Apple are about to launch a tablet style computer, I wonder if their recent purchase of an online advertising company Quattro is because they’ll be offering a centralised advertising service for tablet format publications, so that a publisher can just specify a place for an ad, and get a royalty paid direct by apple for the number of impressions the ad gets.

If they were to do this, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had a policy of text-only, or static ads – overly animated attention stealing ads are, I suspect, the reason people have developed both cognitive blindness for banner ads, as well as ad-blocking software.

A couple of hours until we find out.

EDIT: still waiting, but I thought I’d chime in a bit about why previous tablets have largely failed – in the Windows world, they’ve been about selling a windows computer that doesn’t need a keyboard – that’s the goal as far as microsoft and OEMs have been concerned. The goal hasn’t been “create the best digital magazine experience”, where the hardware and software are just the enabler, because people in the PC world haven’t really had the big picture vision to want to move the world in a particular direction as the goal, in the way Apple did with music. Microsoft doesn’t really want to change the world, they’re the established player, keeping the world the way it is, thankyou very much, is their be all and end all goal.