A friend and marketing analyst sent me his belief that Apple’s campaign against Flash was a mistake and might cripple the company’s empire. Guy Smith of Silicon Strategies Marketing, who consults for software and hardware makers on marketing around the world, looks at CEO Steve Jobs’ anti-Flash campaign as a rare error. Blocking Flash from the iPad and iPhone cuts off content, Guy said, adding in his latest post that “Jobs is trying to string-up Adobe, and in the end might make Apple look like Il Duce on his last day.”
The latest rattling of cyber sabers comes from Apple and Adobe, with Apple’s insistence that Adobe Flash be banished from Jobs’ walled garden of iEverything. Certain slurs have been sounded, including an odd instance by Jobs proclaiming that Adobe Flash was bug ridden. (Jobs is obviously not a Windows user, for he does not know the true meaning of “buggy.”)
Such bogus blusters are convenient covers for real issues. Flash currently commands a huge share of the Rich Internet Application market by virtual of antediluvian virtualization. Long ago, Flash did what people wanted, which was to add value to surfing the Web while eliminating cross platform/browser/religious sectarianism. Want to watch videos of cute kittens or suicidal teenagers on motorcycles, or listen to the latest excuse for music coming out of Nashville on the Web, regardless of whether you are on a PC, Mac, Linux, minis, odd ducks, occasional mainframes, virtual desktops or smart phone? Adobe Flash made it happen by bundling [the player] for free into everything. Except iPhones and iPads.
[To be accurate, Flash is only bundled long enough to force you to update it via download, to combat the latest malware and virus attacks. Much of the bundled Flash is already out of date by the time a new Windows or Mac system boots up. But Guy continues on eliminating Flash from Apple's most mobile devices.]
Therein lay Apple’s finest error (aside from the Newton). As any performer will attest, you give the audience what they want. Putting Snoop Dogg on stage at a cotillion is an error. So is creating an information/media device that does not deliver information/media. Since so much of the world’s content is and will for the foreseeable future remain in Flash, and since Adobe is not sitting still in extending Flash for ever better uses, banning it from hardware is inane. It goes directly against what the audience (market) wants and thus gives them the motivation to consider alternate venues.
First, the Apple devices deliver information and media. Plenty, just not that written to run on Flash Player. To the resulting consideration of alternate venues, I say, “So what? Assume that happens — then what?” So then I’m buying an HP Slate to run Flash? “So much of the world’s content is and will for the foreseeable future remain in Flash,” that’s a real longshot. The key to track the Flash future is the phrase from above, “Long ago, Flash did what people wanted.” Long ago, people watched cable TV for the latest news, too. And Seinfeld. And modems that winked up when you got connected to the Internet.
I disagree with Guy about the iPad’s need for Flash, in part because between the two of us only I own an iPad, and so and have the same 10 days of experience as every other owner. (Perhaps not exactly the same experience; I didn’t buy the $49.95 OmniGraffle app for it [think Windows' Visio planning]. On the other hand, I wrote most of my reply to Guy off an Apple Keyboard Dock, and plenty of people are still waiting for that marvel.) I haven’t missed Flash more than a handful of times out of hundreds of media and content deliveries.
I told Guy he simply needed to see the iPad in action to observe how a Flash-less experience means less than you’d think to business content today — and perhaps little to nothing once content providers adapt to millions of iPads joining the 85 million iPhones and iPod Touches out there. The only difference is that Apple has decided to make a stand against Flash now, after selling 85 million devices that don’t use it.
I have never been a fan of Flash, although I’ve employed it. Many times I’ve met Web designers, clever software developers, or business owners, all of whom were in love with the ox cart that is Flash. You can browse to Nike, big companies, TV networks. Every time I ran one of these apps within a Web site I remembered the advice from a Web site pioneer from the mid-90s, Bob Green of Robelle. As one of the first software companies to offer a Web gateway to his company, Green gave me advice about the design of the 3000 NewsWire, our first Web site and blog: keep it simple; think about the reader who doesn’t have a fast pipe or a fast machine; or does not run a well-ordered system, immune to breakdown.
In other words, try to need as little flash (little F) as possible to spread your content. We’ve toyed with Big F Flash while trying to embed video into the NewsWire’s TypePad blog posts, and it works to the same degree as designing for Explorer: unexpected, corner-case results abound. Web designers I know and have employed get all Yosemite Sam in the face when I ask why our site’s Explorer’s pages look so different, and what could I do about that.
The App Store as Apple’s walled garden is a good metaphor I have seen in many places. Writing in the New York Times tech section over the weekend, Steven Johnson makes a case that given the right conditions, an Apple-controlled store goes from garden to rich rainforest.
The App Store must rank among the most carefully policed software platforms in history. Most of the development tools are created inside Apple, in conditions of C.I.A.-level secrecy. Next to the iPhone platform, Microsoft’s Windows platform looks like a Berkeley commune from the late 60s.
And yet, by just about any measure, the iPhone software platform has been, out of the gate, the most innovative in the history of computing. More than 150,000 applications have been created for it in less than two years, transforming the iPhone into an e-book reader, a flight control deck, a musical instrument, a physician’s companion, a dictation device and countless other things that were impossible just 24 months ago. Perhaps more impressively, the iPhone has been a boon for small developers. As of now, more than half the top-grossing iPad apps were created by small shops.
Those of us who have championed open platforms cannot ignore these facts. It’s conceivable that, had Apple loosened the restrictions surrounding the App Store, the iPhone ecosystem would have been even more innovative, even more democratic. But I suspect that this view is too simplistic. The more complicated reality is that the closed architecture of the iPhone platform has contributed to its generativity in important ways.
The decision to route all purchases through a single payment mechanism makes great sense for Apple, which takes 30 percent of all sales, but it has also helped nurture the ecosystem by making it easier for consumers to buy small apps impulsively with one-click ordering. People don’t want to thumb-type credit card information into their phones each time they download a game to distract the kids during a long drive in the car. One-click purchase also supports lightweight, inexpensive apps, the revenue from which can support small software teams.
The fact that the iPhone platform runs exclusively on Apple hardware helps developers innovate, because it means they have a finite number of hardware configurations to surmount. Developers building apps for, say, Windows Mobile have to create programs that work on hundreds of different devices, each with its own set of hardware features. But a developer who wants to build a game that uses an accelerometer for control, for example, knows that every iPhone OS device in the world contains an accelerometer.
Apple took a lot of heat waiting a year after the introduction of the first-generation iPhone to open the App Store. At the time, it contended that it wanted to ensure that the development tools it shipped met its standards. The success of the App Store suggests that this patience was well worth it.
I’ve lived in this Apple garden, but I’m not locked in. If Mac users want to run Flash applications, we just pick up our MacBooks. But there’s a torrent of testing and reporting out there that says Flash is a pig, backed up by a feeling on my thighs. I hold that MacBook on my lap and play Farmville — which you may know is the most widely-used Flash app in existence. 34 million people a day, and it’s all Flash. And before I can get my sunflowers all planted and my goats milked, my thighs are hot, because Flash has pegged the CPUs off the scale on the late-model MacBook.
What’s easy to forget is what wooly, overwritten lashed up life rafts the Adobe products have become, on balance. I have used them since 1987, starting with Illustrator. Rife with potential, essential to creation, and so very full of just-missed opportunities. On acquaintance of mine is is now a VP of Quality Assurance over at Adobe, and I can’t help but wonder how he doesn’t go to bed planning to get up and suck on a gas pipe to avoid the stall-mucking he must oversee each day.
It goes too far to say that Flash is essential to good content on mobile devices. It’s just plain wrong to say, as Guy does, that Apple won’t entertain any content delivery it can’t tap for a few bucks. Netflix and Zinio are just two that come to mind. The former delivered 7 hours of Dexter episodes to my lap less than 24 hours after the iPad arrived. (And on a single charge, too, because Flash wasn’t involved.) Apple got nothing out of that 7 hours but the cost of the iPad. Zinio delivers 2,000 consumer magazine titles to computers, mobile and otherwise. Big publishers, too, like the ones that print Popular Science and Esquire and Oprah. My Popular Science magazine on the iPad via Zinio is fun and interactive and costs less than the paper issues that I have to throw away. And Apple gets nothing out of that reading, either, except the iPhone or iPad sale.
If Apple wants to kill Flash, the only thing it can do is to keep it off their most mobile devices. Adobe is going to continue to write it and sell it for every platform that it can, because Adobe follows the Intel and Microsoft mantra of “include everything for everybody.” Making choices about what to include reflects more mature insight than “support it all.” It’s almost old-guy thinking, really. People who code for a living, administer systems, review software, design their own Web sites — yeah, they’re appalled at the absence of Flash on the iPad, the draconian Apple rules now in place for writing Apps. Consumers don’t care, or if they do, they can buy an HP Slate. Meanwhile analysts are now dreaming of Apple shares hitting $300 (after 12 months of having increased their value 50 percent during one of the hardest years business has seen.)
I wrote most of a 2,000-word reply on a mobile computer I bought sight unseen. A first for me, in 30 years of buying them for business and pleasure. I have experienced the Apple QA first hand for a few decades while working, and I believed my experiences of Apple’s product build post-2001 would be extended. I don’t miss Flash, and I don’t see how keeping this pig out of a sleek taxi is going to do anything but prop up sales of MacBooks and make Adobe’s tech managers swear out loud on public blogs that embarrass the company. But there’s always the “we can sell you one cheaper” argument to hear from what’s sold outside of a rich garden.
Now Jobs and Company are worshiping at the same altar, and the heretics at Google and the old priests at Microsoft are ready to exorcize a snake from the garden. Microsoft has a tablet in ready mode, and by stealing (again) some Apple innovations, will serve the market with something cheaper … and with Flash.
It’s always about cheaper, isn’t it? Until you buy a BMW or a Mossberg shotgun and discover that spending more, in the right places, feels so much better. For the Cheapers, they just shuttle from deal to deal and hope to get lucky. My brother is a Sprint customer who argued with me all last summer how hot the Palm Pre would be when he got one. Apple better watch out. But he wasn’t buying on Day One. He was waiting for the cheap deal that would give him a $99 handset when his contract turned over and he got his biannual replacement credit. He misjudged, like a lot of the cheapers, the effects of the garden’s walls. By the time he got his free Pre, Palm was so desperate it was selling the smartphones for $79 on Amazon, contract-free.
Or just go ask those people how it feels to adopt “better” technology that cannot get traction because it’s not popular. Having a tablet is the first step. Selling it as a profitable item that generates content revenue is a much bigger step. The HP Slate will take off and the Flash-lovers will buy it, maybe. Or maybe they’ll carry netbooks instead. What I can count upon is the Adobe “we’ll get to optimizing Flash performance soon” response is gonna have to become more of a promise and less of a tease.
Anybody who believes they can kill one product with another is a grandpa who’s staying up past their bedtime. Markets and consumers and financials kill products, for reasons that sometimes none of us can forsee.
The help-we-need-Flash argument overlooks HTML5, or the industry’s distaste for needing a vendor-controlled element like Flash to deliver content. Flash was running about 97 percent of online media services, last I checked. That number can only go down from there. Zinio’s CEO Jeannie Mullen told me that “we’re de-Flashifying as fast as we can,” and they rebuilt their Web site in a matter of months.
To be fair, Apple makes mistakes and stretches the truth, too. iPad 1.0 WiFi reception, and fooling people into thinking the Macs have no viruses, are examples of each. But Apple has always played to the congregation, because the IT experts and Windows promoters hated that little rebel outpost called Apple — how dare they step away from a Windows tune? Oh, that iTunes thing won’t amount to much, Napster is a better deal, too many people can make a bit of money on an MP3 music player, nobody can just jump into a phone market and succeed, yada, yada, yada.
It’s fun to be contrary, but the Apple monomanical drive is necessary to swim upstream, I believe. Il Duce made the trains run on time, and if Il Jobe makes Adobe’s Flash less hot on my thighs, I won’t care what else the war has to cripple. I’m a consumer of information like that.
So Guy and I will disagree on this: Sometimes you have to deny your market’s wishes. Not never, because your market sometimes wants exactly what will cripple you. They don’t care if you survive or thrive to think up something that somebody else will steal. There’s not much to steal from the iPad except for the idea that a better tablet will sell, given enough push from a company with $30 billion in cash. Apple is only keeping Flash content from its iPhone, Touch and iPad customers at the moment — and check back with us in one year to see how Hulu and the like are responding to 3 million new devices that can’t use Flash. The iPad is still a few years away from being a creation tool as competent as any laptop. But look who’s kicked open the door to the future again, eh? Who in Hoboken cared about tablets before January? If Mr. Black Turtleneck wants to war with Adobe over Flash, let the bodies fall. As a consumer I don’t want to support any software that looks like it’s built to make my hardware feel feeble, or my thighs feel hot today. A better Flash, plus a rich walled garden? I think I win on both fronts in this empire’s battle.
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