Apple's Behavior a Throwback to 1984, Adobe CTO Says
PC World

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

Apple's refusal to allow Flash on the iPhone hurts innovation and is "like 1984 in a lot of ways," Adobe Systems' CTO said on Wednesday, implying that Apple has become the "Big Brother" it rebelled against in its iconic TV ad from that year.

"The story is bigger than HTML versus Flash. It's about freedom of choice on the Web," CTO Kevin Lynch said at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Wednesday, when he was asked to comment on "the elephant in the room" during an on-stage interview

"I think it's like 1984 in a lot of ways," Lynch said later, apparently referring to Apple's famous Macintosh computer ad, in which an athlete hurls a sledgehammer through a giant screen in front of an auditorium of gray worker drones. The face on the screen was seen to represent the dominant power in computing at the time.

Lynch also compared Apple's behavior to that of the railroad companies in the 19th century, when progress was held back because different companies used different gauges of railroad track.

"That wasn't good for the industry, the U.S. economy or competition, and that's what's attempting to be done right now, and that's totally counter to the Web," Lynch said. "The equivalent of the gauge of the railroads today is rewriting native code for applications on a particular operating system, and that's expensive and inefficient," he said.

It was the latest volley in a public dispute over Apple's refusal to let applications that use Adobe's Flash technology run on Apple's iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. CEO Steve Jobs has said it is because Flash will drain the battery life and slow the performance of its devices, and because it is not an open standard.

Lynch has already responded to those arguments and suggested that Adobe has given up on Apple, preferring to develop Flash for rival mobile platforms such as Google Android, the BlackBerry and Palm (soon to be part of Hewlett-Packard).

Meanwhile, U.S. regulators are reportedly considering an antitrust probe of Apple over the way it requires developers to use its own tools to build iPhone applications. Lynch seemed to allude to those reports Wednesday.

"I don't think it's the role of the company to exercise judgment on what people should use, that's the role of society and the law," he said.

"The technology issue Apple has with us is not that [Flash] doesn't work, it's that it does work," Lynch said. "You can make a [Flash] application that works fine across OSes, and they don't like that."

There's been much discussion at the Web 2.0 conference about how well Flash will compete with HTML 5, an upcoming version of the Web's core markup language that will support such capabilities as video and animation, and which Jobs has proposed as an alternative to Flash.

Lynch made it clear Wednesday that Adobe won't keep all its eggs in one basket. HTML 5 is "a great step forward" and Adobe will try to build "the best tools in the world" for HTML 5 development, he said. But he also thinks that Flash will stay one step ahead.

"There's lots of room for Flash to keep innovating, filling in holes at a more rapid pace than what HTML has been moving at," Lynch said.

Adobe is displaying a prototype tablet device developed by Nvidia and running Flash in Adobe's booth on the show floor, Lynch said. Many devices like this will go on sale in the second half of the year, he said.

"All of the innovation that's happening with a variety of companies is going to dwarf what's happening with any one company," Lynch said.

What's Behind Apple's Clash with Flash?

NPR

 

People who surf the Web with any of Apple's mobile devices including the iPad or the iPhone sometimes encounter large chunks of empty space where a video or an interactive game should appear.

That's because Apple's mobile products don't support Adobe Systems' Flash, the technology that powers those parts of the Web.

Apple chief Steve Jobs isn't a fan of Flash — and he released a letter Thursday explaining exactly why. He's even got some of the Internet's most popular destinations — The New York Times, Facebook, even NPR — working to strip Flash away from websites on the iPad.

So why doesn't Jobs like Flash?

Jobs says Adobe — not Apple — has a closed system because its products are 100 percent proprietary and this conflicts with Apple's desire to use open standards for the Web.

"It's purely technical. It's not a very good program for mobile devices," Leander Kahney, author of the biography Inside Steve's Brain, tells host Guy Raz. "It's a CPU hog and it drains battery life very quickly, so he doesn't want it on it."

Flash is the dominant multimedia technology in use right now.

"It has amazing penetration. Three-quarters of all the video on the Net is encoded in flash," says Kahney, who is also editor of cultofmac.com. "Almost all of the games, all the casual games — especially the really popular games like FarmVille on Facebook — they're all encoded in Flash. Almost all of the technology world is embedded in Flash."

As recently as six months ago some technology experts thought Flash was would dominate Web multimedia. Now some are saying the technology is doomed.

This isn't the first time Apple has taken aim at a mainstream technology. In the late 1990s, the floppy drive disappeared after Apple introduced the first iMac with its CD drive. And iTunes and the iPod have slashed sales of CDs.

There's also been some controversy over the lack of Blu-ray drives on Apple computers. But Kahney says Apple's reasoning has been that consumers can already get a lot of high-definition content by streaming over the Internet.

Although Jobs is an intensely private person, Kahney thinks his intentions are good: "I think he is genuinely interested in crafting technology that is easy to use for consumers, and Flash wrecks that experience or has the potential to wreck that experience. And so, it's gone. He's just extremely ruthless about that."

Jobs Attacks Flash as Unfit for iPhone

The Wall Street Journal

Steve Jobs escalates fight with Adobe

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs escalated his fight with Adobe Systems Inc. over the software known as Flash, a battle that could shape the evolution of video and gaming on mobile devices.

Mr. Jobs—after months of criticism from Adobe and software developers for his company's decision to ban Flash from iPhones, iPods and iPads— Thursday took the unusual step of posting a lengthy essay on Apple's Web site criticizing Adobe's software as a flawed throwback to a time before smartphones caught the fancy of consumers.

"Flash was created during the PC era—for PCs and mice," Mr. Jobs wrote in an essay totaling more than 1,600 words. "The mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open Web standards—all areas where Flash falls short."

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen fired back in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, disputing Mr. Jobs's assertions about shortcomings in Flash. That is a "smoke screen," he argued, for Apple's plan to keep its own lock over software development for its mobile devices. "It's clear that it has nothing to do with technology," he said.

The tough rhetoric underscores the huge stakes in setting key technical standards for the mobile Internet, a process that could affect the fortunes of device makers, programmers, media companies and advertisers.

Apple, a PC pioneer whose influence in that market waned, has won new power in the mobile world because of the success of the iPhone and the App Store created to supply software for it.



Analysts and industry executives don't expect Mr. Jobs to readily share that power with other standard-setters such as Adobe. "They are trying to control their ecosystem," said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research, of Apple. "It's all about control."

Mr. Jobs, through a spokeswoman, declined a request for an interview to elaborate on his essay and the reason for releasing it now.

Media companies and advertisers have privately expressed frustration about Apple's stance toward Flash because their online video and other Web content incorporates Flash. Adobe, meanwhile, has said it will try to work closely with Google Inc. to popularize Flash on phones using Google's Android system.

Flash is the most popular video format on the Web, and is also used for animation and advertising. It has been slower to take hold in cellphones, but Adobe has recently introduced new versions aimed at mobile devices.

Instead of Flash, Apple is supporting Web sites that use an emerging standard called HTML 5, which is being developed by a consortium that it is a part of alongside Google. But some Web developers say HTML 5 isn't yet ready to be used for anything besides trials.

Apple's anti-Flash policy is not new, but attained greater prominence after the iPad was first publicly demonstrated in January. With a small device like the iPhone, people expected a truncated version of the Web, but with the iPad, people had expected to be able to watch video on the device's big Web browser, said Ben Bajarin, an analyst at Creative Strategies, a research and consulting firm.

Another factor is a new version of Adobe's Creative Suite software, which includes tools for using Flash to build iPhone apps. Just before Adobe formally unveiled the software, Apple changed the terms of use for its App Store to forbid apps written with the new software.

Dave Wolf, vice president of strategy at Cynergy Systems Inc., a Washington, D.C., design firm, calls Apple's no-Flash policy "a pain." Mr. Wolf had planned to build apps for clients using the new Adobe software.

Developers are "caught in the middle," agreed David Clarke, founder of BGT Partners, a Web design firm in Miami.

The essay is a rare but not unprecedented move for Mr. Jobs. Three years ago he published a statement urging the music industry to let Apple sell music without anticopying software.

The debate has divided the media and technology industries. Adobe supporters created a Facebook page called "I'm with Adobe" that has nearly 11,000 members while others have sided with Apple.

Mr. Hammond of Forrester said many points raised by Mr. Jobs are just wrong. But other analysts disagreed. "I think Jobs summarized all the frustrations he's had," said Rick Doherty, an analyst with consulting firm Envisioneering Group. "I'd be really surprised if Adobe can challenge his arguments because they're predominantly true."

Mr. Jobs argues in his letter that Flash hasn't worked well on cellphones, shortens their battery life, adds security problems and doesn't support touch interfaces. He said Adobe's effort to use Flash to create apps for Apple's devices could cause problems if Adobe were slow to add support for Apple enhancements.

Adobe's Mr. Narayen said developers and consumers benefit from Adobe's multi-platform approach, which could ultimately make apps for iPhones work on other devices. "It doesn't benefit Apple and that's why you see this reaction," he said.