It was a surprising gaffe to see an Apple demo with a hole on Wednesday, when Steve Jobs did a demo of the new iPad. But there on the screen were holes in “the best way to browse the Web.”
Those holes on the browser’s screen were Flash videos, built in to sites like The New York Times and Time magazine. Flash is everywhere except the iPad and iPhone. Apple doesn’t like it because Flash is a hog, a tar-pit that brings the iPhone to a crawl. And apparently the iPad, even with the hot A4 processor Apple built to drive the device.
What’s a business need Flash for, anyway? Well, information presented quickly. Hit the Wall Street Journal’s front page with an iPhone to see what you’re missing. All the video, that’s what. A 2-minute video summary can be the best way to find an overview of a business story. It’s a stubborn oversight for the iPad and Apple to sneer at Flash. At the WSJ site it’s especially important, because the paper is now owned by News Corp., which runs a little thing called Fox News.
There will be a lot of business information on the Journal’s site that won’t appear on an iPad. Jobs’ blinders during the demo were among the most un-Apple-like facets I’ve seen from the company. Especially in front of an audience of journalists in the media.
The articles are starting to appear today about Flash being missing. The LA Times posted an item this morning that compared Apple’s absence on the Flash team with Adobe’s desire to put the product onto iPads and iPhones. The disconnect shows two things to a business customer. First, Apple wants a video standard they can control or influence, like the pretty-green HTML5. Second, that no matter how fast you think your hardware is on your business tool, there’s always something to stop it dead.
The lack of Flash is something I’ve come to accept on the iPod Touch and iPhone (3GS) I use. But this missing piece cuts Apple’s mobile products with complete Web features down to just one: its notebooks.
This is different than a high-pixel camera not present in the first iPhones, or tethering or MMS messaging only arriving 2 years after the rollout. Those are good-enough (photos) or niche uses for most. Flash has become a defacto standard for video. On a product aimed at content delivery like the iPad, it’s a big, glaring check-minus. And so Flash support becomes something that HP will be able to make big strides with, if it can deliver Flash to the anticipated Slate tablet.
Tradeoffs like this are always on a business owner’s mind when they make a technology choice. Pick Windows for your OS and live with the storm of viruses written for the popular, program-rich environment. Use a Palm Pre and endure the dearth of apps while you save money on the device and its data plans. Apple doesn’t usually leave obvious holes in its flank like this.
So it’s an act of faith to expect the company to correct this, just like its failure to support Internet telephony over 3G, or the foot-dragging to give Google Voice a chance on the iPhone. Like any big corporation, Apple tries to get away with what they think will work best for the largest return on investment. The calculations will work against this new tool. They are likely to have an impact on how many iPads get sold this year to people who use mobile tools to consume video reports.
Apple has demonstrated this week that the first release of this product is going to be like the early Kindles or the rollout iPhones. They’ll be $499 products that are going to need a $699 refresh, or a more advanced processor. Unless Apple believes it can knock Flash out of the Internet, somehow. That’s going to be a problem with its newest content partners, the five major book publishers who will sell books through the iBookstore. Books have Flash ads promoting them. Publishers will have to create alternative sales tools to hawk them on an iPad. These kinds of detours don’t work out well for a vendor, not even Apple.
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