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Adobe Calls Out Apple With Ads In NY Times, WSJ
Hugh Pickens writes "Businessweek reports that Adobe has taken out newspaper advertisements in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times today and posted an open letter to call out the tablet-computer maker for stifling competition. 'We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs,' the letter states. 'No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web.' The letter is part of a widening rift between Apple and Adobe. Two weeks ago, Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs wrote a 29-paragraph public missive panning Adobe's Flash as having 'major technical drawbacks.' US antitrust enforcers also may investigate Apple following a complaint from Adobe, people familiar with the matter said this month. Adobe has also launched a banner ad campaign to let you know that they love Apple. The two-piece banner ads are composed of a 720x90-pixel 'We [heart] Apple' design, followed by a 300x250-pixel medium rectangle that reads: 'What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.'"
Be able to open massive security holes in any device or platform! - Adobe
Adobe: We Bitch and Moan until we Get Our Way(TM)
But they still have to be dragged kicking and screaming to rewrite their products (Flash isnt their only product) to stop using APIs from two deprecations ago. They apparently love Microsoft even more than Apple.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I love you ... I just don't like the things you do... or what you say...
Translation:
I love f*cking you...
Unless, of course, you're using FreeBSD and friends..
Now explain how locking all their devices to depend on iTunes has anything to do with them being the best possible.
Would the effort required to make them function in a sane way (and then have iTunes use that functionality) be so much greater than the effort expended on trying to tie things to iTunes?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
WHAT?! Tons of people complain about that. It's a fucking cell phone, it should be able to run J2ME apps, and the fact that it can't is solely due to Apple's need to make sure they get paid for every app their stupid devices can run.
Look, I don't care if Apple decides not to include Flash by default. Fine, whatever.
The fact that you can't CHOOSE to install Flash and you can't CHOOSE to use another, more powerful browser, on the other hand - that I care about. THAT'S an asshole, anti-competitive move. Apple deserves to be smacked down for that.
Imagine if, along with bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft FORBID anyone from running any other browser on their OS at all, and required EVERY app to be approved by Microsoft before it could be allowed to run. Apple's doing EXACTLY THAT.
It's a fucking computer. I should be able to use whatever language I want and whatever libraries I want to target it. As long as something can create code that the computer can run, who the fuck is Apple to say whether or not I'm allowed to write software using it?!
I know that's not going to sit well with the /. crowd...
Actually, I find that in the argument between Adobe and Apple, Apple usually comes out on top because at least its horrible, draconian software is stable and usable.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Dear Adobe:
I recently read your open letter to Apple and let me just say that I cannot agree more. I particularly liked this bit:
"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs. No company -- no matter how big or how creative -- should dictate what you can create, how you create it, or what you can experience on the web."
Since my platform of choice is [64 bit Linux, Solaris, Irix, HPUX, any of the Various BSDs...] I cannot wait for your forthcoming (very soon I expect) release of Flash for this platform! I realize that my platform of choice is not the most popular one out there, but your message gives me hope! Given your support of openness, and in full understanding that my platform is rather obscure, perhaps you could simply release most of the slient code as open source and allow me to port it myself. That would be even better.
Thanks
Users of various platforms that Adobe does not support.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Terrible analogy. Adobe may not help you, but they certainly won't do anything to stop you. Very different to what Apple wants to do.
I don't think this is the type of freedom our founding father's had in mind when they wrote the Bill of Rights. I think the type of freedom they had in mind would be Apple having the freedom to not support Flash on their device and consumers having the freedom to not buy an Apple product if this design decision is not to their liking. It's not like Apple is locking out Adobe to push their own proprietary standard, there is no anti-trust issue here.
Adobe is the next Sun. They're going to keep faltering and faltering until they're bought out by some giant. Open source and open standards are going to kill them. Eventually Gimp will work well enough to replace Photoshop, Flash will be dead, an open source WYSIWYG will replace InDesign/Dreamweaver, and this trend will continue with all their products. I think the folks at Adobe realize the impact that open source will have. They know that keeping the web running on Flash is their only hope to survive as a company.
Adobe is like if Microsoft only had Office and IE. Look at what OpenOffice, Firefox, Chrome, and Google Docs are doing. Software as a product is a failing business model, software as a service is the future. IBM and Google know this, that's why they're so ahead of the curve.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Because blowing a gaping hole in their foot isn't going to help them either.
So get up offa that keyboard, come open the door and let me in. And go make me a sandwich while I use your computer to develop in Flash. You have Mountain Dew and Cheetos, right? No? You bastard! Stop infringing on my freedom to eat and drink what I want and go get me some!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Android is now a bigger market to shoot for anyway.
Android is a bigger market, I suppose, but which Android is the bigger market within the bigger market? Fragmentation of the versions and the not so backwards / forwards compatibility is making it hard to target.
Why bother
This is a battle between purveyors of closed devices that exert outrageous amounts of control over what users can do with their devices, and purveyors of bug riddled crash prone propretary garbage who are misusing the word "open" as cover for a self-serving argument.
Wouldn't it be nice if they both lost, somehow?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in a deeper pocket, my friend.
Pfft! My COBOL.Net based app for the iPad contraption will pwn your feeble efforts! I have my COBOL to Ada to Lisp to LabView to FORTRAN to VHDL to C to Objective C/Cocoa workflow all ready to start chugging away. Throw the switch, Igor!
It is of course self-serving. But that doesn't mean it doesn't also happen to be true. Essentially coincidental, but still...
This space available.
Don't you understand? "Open" means "Able to Run Flash as God intended" not some piffle about "does what its owner wants it to"...
The choice is Apple's, but that doesn't make it a good thing.
It would be just as buggy and crash-prone [zdnet.com] as it is right now on the Mac... Because it's on every darn page on the web - for adverts - it'd be running almost constantly as the user uses Safari; so the other down-side comes into play - it's a huge battery hog.
Granted, yes, Flash sucks. As a user, I'm not sure I'd install it.
But that should be up to the user, not Apple. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone right tomorrow, would you be required to install it? I suppose iPhone users are used to Apple making their decisions for you, but think about that -- what if they actually made it your choice?
Forget the browser for a moment, though. They're banning it and all other third-party frameworks in an effort to prevent cross-platform applications, even if they compile to Objective-C, which is downright evil. More evil than anything Microsoft ever did. To claim that this has anything to do with battery life or crashing is moronic -- Apple already presumably checks things like this before they approve apps, right? And Adobe was offering to compile to Objective-C, so most of the bugginess and battery-draining would hopefully go away. In either case, it seems downright fascist to ban a tool because it might make the experience suck, instead of evaluating the resulting app and see if it does make the experience suck.
Now, I agree that this is good for Apple, in the short term. It's also good for the Web, in the short term, because it forces people to start using HTML5. But in the long term, I think it will come back to bite them, and in any case, don't pretend it's a good thing for either iPhone/Pad developers or users.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
According to that article, Android, on all devices, is barely beating out iPhone OS on one device. iPhone OS is sold on three distinct devices (iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad), of which the latter two were not included in the numbers. Android has a long way to go.
Android may be a bigger market, but the iPhone I'm targeting with my app resides in the deeper pockets of people demonstrably more easily parted with their money for less reward, my friend.
FTFY
Imagine if, along with bundling Opera with the Wii, Nintendo FORBID anyone from running any other browser on their OS at all, and required EVERY game to be approved by Nintendo before it could be allowed to run. Apple's doing EXACTLY THAT.
Funny how nobody complains about game consoles, network appliances, or any other propriety electronic device being a closed platform. It's only evil if Apple does it?
Right, and the 3-digit creativity software is only attractive because Flash is so ubiquitous. Now that Flash's domination is being threatened, Adobe's cash cow is threatened as well.
Personally, I think Adobe has a retarded business model that is specifically designed to milk customer's wallets. It needs to die.
No problem. We'll just load Firefox and Flashblock - Oh wait...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Because it's on every darn page on the web - for adverts - it'd be running almost constantly as the user uses Safari; so the other down-side comes into play - it's a huge battery hog.
What makes you think advertisers won't just use HTML5 <canvas> to make their seizure-magnets?
Forget the browser for a moment, though. They're banning it and all other third-party frameworks in an effort to prevent cross-platform applications, even if they compile to Objective-C, which is downright evil. More evil than anything Microsoft ever did.
Microsoft didn't allow indie games at all on the original Xbox console. Is that evil?
But that should be up to the user, not Apple. If Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone right tomorrow, would you be required to install it? I suppose iPhone users are used to Apple making their decisions for you, but think about that -- what if they actually made it your choice?
I'm sure they considered that. But take it a bit further... Jane Public enables flash to watch the 'OMG ponies' video-of-the-day. Are you confident that every single user would then think "Oh, now I have to turn Flash back off, otherwise my phone will now suck". I'm not. And then a little while down the road it's not "I take the personal responsibility for making my phone suck because I turned on Flash", it's more like "the iPhone sucks. Apple sucks".
Tell me again how this benefits Apple ?
And Adobe was offering to compile to Objective-C, so most of the bugginess and battery-draining would hopefully go away.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Translating Flash to ObjC and then compiling it doesn't remove any of the bad algorithmic design in Flash unless they rewrite Flash itself. I once wrote a Java->C++ converter which worked pretty well for me until gcj came along. If you wrote bad Java code (say: busy wait on events) you'd get bad C++ code out the other end - there's nothing magical about translating to ObjC that fixes bad code.
Adobe tried to make an end-run around Apple's "we don't want your crappy Flash environment because it sucks" position, by implementing a Flash->C (or ObjC, whatever) translator. Apple either had to capitulate at that point, and accept all of the problems with Flash on their devices, or they could prevent it. If Adobe has a Flash->C translator, I can't see any real way Apple could prevent Flash without doing what they did.
I'd say that if Adobe had done the right thing, and made Flash better (efficient, stable), and ported *that* to Android instead of putting effort into trying to work around Apple's position on Flash, they'd have made a *far* better case for Apple eating humble pie and asking Adobe to implement this mythical excellent Flash environment for the iPhone. But they didn't.
br Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Apple is only trying to "stop" you when you use their devices. They aren't trying to stop me if I'm using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS (or even on OS X).
This may be a flawed analogy, but wouldn't it be akin to a company releasing a car that only ran on diesel? That impedes all the companies that sell only "normal" gasoline. They're stifling competition! If you want to use "normal" gasoline, buy a car that runs on that. If diesel usurps gasoline as the standard fuel of choice, maybe it's because it's better.
Indeed. If the gestapo has a gun to my head and I start railing about how such practices are unfair, it's very much self-serving, but the argument itself is also very much correct.
And before anyone chimes in, no I'm not comparing Apple to Nazi Germany. I'm just magnifying the scale of something to make it easier to see.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
No kidding! That and show that you can make flash run on mobile platforms you do have access like android phones. How many times now has the android flash rollout been pushed back? 3? 4?! And Adobe is complaining they can't use it on the iPhone?! I suspect half the issue with flash is the lack of developer skill, that many develop in a way that makes it work but don't debug and slim their code when they are done (ease of development makes for ease of cutting corners and lack of good code I suppose). Call me a fan boi (trust me I'm not, even as a mac user, I am a large critic of apple in recent years), but I side with Apple on this. Show us Flash working well on other mobile devices before you complain.
brickspeed.net for your old Volvo performance addiction
... If that statement were applied to your desktop you'd be seeing red and you know it. Let's change it a little:
"Microsoft is only trying to 'stop' you when you use their OS. They aren't trying to stop you from using Firefox or Chrome or whatever on some other OS"...
If the above were the case instead of "limited" device like an ipad or iphone, far more people would have an issue with it.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
Last time this happened, when they dropped Adobe Premiere, Apple bought Final Cut Pro and turned it into a good replacement with version 3 vs Premiere 6 and with Final Cut Pro 4 blew Premiere out of the water for a good number of years. Even though Premiere is back on Mac, I don't know anyone in the industry that uses it on Mac. They all still use FCP.
My guess would be Apple's response would be to fork or support programs like GIMP and Inkscape and throw developers at them and overhaul their UI's to Apple's standards. What better way to spite Adobe than create free tools to replace their cash cow. Adobe already bought out and killed the only competition in professional web & graphics tools (Macromedia).
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
It's a fucking computer.
That's where you've got it wrong. The world has moved beyond the point where everything with a CPU is a computer. The iPhone is an appliance. It does all the things it was designed to do. No manufacturer is obligated to make their appliance do anything other than what they claimed it would do when they sold it to you. If you want a different appliance, feel free to vote with your wallet. If there is nothing that does what you want and you can convince some venture capitalists you're right, make a competing product. But Apple doesn't owe it to you to design appliances that work the way you wished they did.
I'm curious how Adobe can claim "consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content" just after they implemented support for Selective Output Control in their proprietary DRM.
You do realize that by far the majority of Flash content on the Web is videos and video-based ads, right? But whatever. Keep chasing Adobe's incomplete and inconsistent publication of specs on each new iteration of Flash (which usually lags by at least a year) and tie yourself to a spec that can be disappeared at any moment.
At least Microsoft had the courtesy to put OOXML in the hands of Ecma and offer the Covenant Not to Sue. With the Flash spec you don't have either of those things.
I couldn't view every page in every browser on every device before the iPhone or iPad, so how am I limited?
This isn't about freedom, it's about a market choice. People have bought the iPhone and iPad in droves and have said, more or less, that the devices are compelling enough to buy even without Flash support.
Apple doesn't have anywhere close to a monopoly in the mobile device space, so I don't understand the problem.
Someone enlighten me please.
Well it's a good thing Adobe has some people who are as smart as you are then, since this is exactly what they did! Have a look at this video of Flash running pretty fucking well on the N1.
I'm with you on that, I don't like Apple or their products for the most part, but I'm all for them limiting flash if they want to on their phones. I know it pisses a lot of people off but your absolutly right on with your analogy. They aren't being anti-competetive at all even though people seem to want to believe that. If I had the mod points +1 to you. People these days seem to believe that whatever they want is what should happen, they don't get that just cause they want it doesn't mean companies have to give it to you. Should they? depends on how big the market is, but they don't HAVE to.
letting an idiot know they are an idiot is not a game... it's a responsibility. - by Kristopeit, M. D. (1892582)
I'm not sure what iPhone sales have to do with how many iPod Touches and iPads are out there, especially given that iPod Touches now outsell the iPhone. And outselling during one quarter doesn't make a bigger market, especially when there were many more iPhones than Androids sold before that period that are still in use. Perhaps you're confusing the smartphone market with the app market? Few, if any, app devs are actually selling phones.
Explain the fact that Apple will be happy to host and serve your free app on their store and how it fits into your logic bomb here.
You can choose. It takes effort but they can't and won't stop you from jailbreaking and installing any app you want. They will stop supporting you however, which is perfectly acceptable.
Wow, I guess you don't know enough about windows to realize its been going that direction for a while now eh? Load an unsigned driver in Windows Vista/2008/7 without switching to test mode ...
So is my wrist watch and my old dumb nokia phone, but I can't install random apps on either of them. Fuck nokia and casio too!
What you want, is the world to fit your whim, and thats simply never going to happen regardless of how loud you scream, what temper tantrums you throw or what lame arguments you make in an attempt to get your way.
You don't always get your way, get the hell over it. Don't buy the product if it doesn't satisfy you, its that simple. Welcome to the free market. Don't like it? Tough shit, the rest of us are perfectly fine with it and the majority wins.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I'm not an Apple lover, or an Apple hater. I am a Microsoft basher, though.
But, my question is - what does Apple sell, and what does Microsoft sell, exactly?
Apple seems to sell several hardware products, along with the software necessary to operate them.
Microsoft offers nothing but software, really. Their few hardware offerings are only small parts of their overall sales, right?
To me, there is one heckuva difference. Up to a point, at least, Apple should have the right to say what is going to run on the hardware that they support with guarantees that the hardware is going to work. Only up to a point - jailbroken Apple devices were jailbroken for a reason. And, those jailbroken devices are no longer under warranty, of course.
I hate it when people compare Apple with Microsoft, trying to draw a conclusion that monopoly laws should apply to Apple for the same reasons that Microsoft was/is/will be in trouble with various courts around the world.
Maybe, just maybe, Apple is guilty of some obscure unfair competition laws, but they are NOT a monopoly, unless and until they capture significantly more than 50% of the market for telephones, or computers, or some other device. Then, we can start quibbling over finer points of law than "They have a huge market share in some specific brand/type/style of device".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It would be just as buggy and crash-prone as it is right now on the Mac. Unless you believe the demo was one that "shouldn't have been shown", and that seeing a U-tube video made behind closed-doors with as many takes as it needs to get right is in any way comparable to running it on nearly every darn page on the web. For adverts.
When I looked at that video, at about the 5 minute mark they start to show how I'd be using Flash most of the time, ie: as a part of the web-page rather than just Flash on its own. To me, it didn't look as though it was running at all well. Having Flash on the web-page caused the page-update to be slow-as-molasses, and scrolling to be about 2 fps.
And this is the best they could do, under controlled circumstances, cherry-picking the sites to use ? Give me a break!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
They are just being assholes to developers and to third party companies. If all companies were like that, there would be very less variety and the whole ecosystem would suffer.
Note: It's not illegal to be an asshole, but you can still get publicly called out for it, like Adobe and some posters here are doing.
This space for rent.
Quicktime and iTunes are good at what they do. I have heard bad things about the Windows versions, though.
But as far as professional software, Logic is amazing. I've heard similar things about Final Cut, but I don't do video editing.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
That is indeed the reason. There was nothing wrong with the study, only the implications people are taking from it. iPhone OS authors collect from the very same app versions running on all three devices. Android developers have to release different versions of their app for different Android phones.
And of course it's international sales that matter.
Also it's obviously wrong because the size of the market for apps is: "apps sold", not "devices sold". Developers are dojng far better on iPhone than Android for versions of the same app. Orders of magnitude better.
Thus it's wrong to say that Android sales topping iPhone sales on that study means it's a bigger market. Wrong in several different ways.
Itunes and Quicktime anyone? Sorry, but I'm going to have to call BS on that.
1) Those aren't "professional creative tools".
2) The OS X versions work just fine, it's the Windows versions that are shitty (although Quicktime X still doesn't have a playlist function built-in).
Using your argument, it would be ok if Dell or HP sold a combo hardware/software box that could only run manufacturer approved application. Selling a packaged combo, with a limited number of software options would minimize support cost and improve vendor margins. Software vendors would have to have their applications approved by Dell and could only sell their applications through Dell. And by the way, you'd need to use their approved browsers and accept whatever ads the manufacturer wanted to push at you. This model would improve PC reliability (only tested and approved applications could be run) and increase the manufacturer's revenue. Back in the old days, we called this crapware--but at least you could uninstall those applications or reinstall to OS (or the OS of your choice)..
Pretty much what Apple has done.
and iphones and ipad arent fragmented?
theres 3 differnet hardware versions of the iphone with a 4th coming in a few months. unless you target the lowest common denominator here it might not be fully compatible too. plus the ipad is different again as well.
Unfortunately Adobe doesn't have Apple's marketing pull. All Apple had to do to let people know their position was for Steve Jobs to post something on their website. If Adobe did the same thing, no one would really notice. They have to get the word out.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
when neither of them are even close to being "open" or really staunch supporters of all things "open."
That discounts the entire backing of Webkit from Apple (used in almost every mobile device today) and also the strong HTML5 support they have given.
Not to mention the support for other projects, like CLANG/LLVM, GCC, ZeroConf, etc. etc.
Or the fact that without Apple, we'd still be buying DRM laden music online.
To claim Apple does nothing to support open standards is to ignore some very real good they have done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No, fragmentation is what the Android platform has (And Symbian and MS Mobile too). What you describe there is called "backward compatibility" - as seen and welcomed on Windows, Macs and sometimes consoles (GameCube->Wii, PSI to PSII).
Additionally what you are missing is that app developers can indeed create and sell a single app which runs on an iPad in full screen with all the iPad widgets, and also runs on an iPhone or iPod Touch. It's called a Universal Application.
I've no idea what you mean. It sounds like bluster. I've only ever used worldwide market share, and whenever US market share is brought up I point out it's worldwide market share that counts. ALL sales that a company makes matters, not just the ones that happen to be in America. It's even more important here because we are talking about how big a market there is for developers of software on the platforms. Developers (at least for the Apple App Store) sell their apps internationally, not just to the US.
In part you didn't comprehend what I wrote, and in part you are just plain wrong. The size of the market for iPhone apps is the total number of apps sold by all app developers. It;s not the number sold by a singe developer, nor is it the number of devices sold.
I don't need a hint. I'm an iPhone developer. I know full well the reasons for the success of iPhone Apps and the relative failure of Android apps. Yes, a major part of it is how easy Apple makes it for users to find, buy and install apps from their App Store. But there's also plenty of other factors, including the point that people purchasing iPhones mostly do so because they WANT to run apps. Many of those Android sales are cheap or free generic phones bought by people who just want a phone.
Now that you know I'm not partial to either company, why should Apple be able to block Adobe's media platform out of their hardware?
Why should Adobe be able to force Apple to offer certain apps on Apple's provided App store service?
Isn't this just like Microsoft bundling IE with Windows, leaving other browsers at a huge disadvantage?
No. Tying is only illegal and only undermines the free market when one of the markets being bundled has overwhelming influence in that market; otherwise competition works just fine to solve the problem (if it is one for consumers).
Isn't this worse because Adobe isn't even getting a chance to gain iPad customers?
No, because Adobe is not guaranteed the right to access any particular set of customers of any other device. Adobe doesn't get the chance to target GE Microwave users either. Apple doesn't get the chance to target Adobe Framemaker customers because Adobe doesn't offer a Mac version anymore. Neither company has a right to force the other to conform in a way to get access to those customers. Adobe can write apps for the iPhone just like anyone else, They can write App tools to make HTML5 apps just like anyone else. They have no legal or ethical right to anything more on Apple's service offering.
This is also companies deciding how their customers use their product, and that is bad.
Nope. Apple users can use their phones however they want. They don't even have to use Apple's app store. They can jailbreak it or install a different OS on their phone if they want. If they choose to use Apple's service, then they can.
It may not be illegal, but it is very bad and I really wish this community would get past their fanboi-ism and on to the actual topic.
I don't care for my phone to be as locked down as the iPhone and I'm enough of a security geek to be confident I can secure a different phone and vet apps properly. So I probably won't buy an iPhone because I don't care for it. That doesn't mean I think we should toss the laws out the window and let Adobe force Apple to conform to their desires in Apple's own offerings. If you don't like it, but an Android already. There's no monopoly on smartphones forcing you to buy an iPhone. How is that "fanboi-ism"?
If Apple gets away with this then they will set a sort of precedence.
I think the precedent is well established. Playstation, Atari, Steam, Barnes and Noble... pretty much any store whether a brick and mortar operation or online service can decide to stock whatever products they feel like and are not forced to carry others. Devices can be set up to work with a store, like XBox live. The iPhone App store is no different from a legal or ethical perspective.
It could start a trend where any hardware company could block a software company from their product, or the other way around, or with any combination of industries/products.
Well, technically it has to be a hardware/software/service company, since they have to offer all three vertically integrated in order to do this, but yeah, when a company offers all three they sure can lock out anyone they want... unless the customer replaces those locked in components (which the provider cannot stop for the most part).
Capitalism is great and all *cough* but the quest for a higher bottom line seems to remove all morals and justice from business and Apple's behavior represents just one of many slippery slopes.
Capitalism is great in that it takes the existing lack of morals, self interest, and greed and channels that into a mechanism that results in more innovation and lower prices for people. If you don't like the iPhone offering, nothing is stopping you from buying a different phone and using a more open app store. Write to Apple and tell them why you made the choice, and maybe they will decide the business case favors a more open approach. P.S. The "slippery slope" is the name of a common logical fallacy. As such it makes for a less convincing argument than you might think.
Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they (Apple) are already doing exactly that -- either building all-new apps from scratch, or revamping the OSS you mentioned. After all, you can just look at iWork versus Microsoft Office to see that they've got the stones to take on the entrenched giants.
Warning: Contents May Be Flammable. Keep Out Of Reach Of Children.
I would far more upset losing the use of my special-purpose computing appliance as a phone (guess which I have) due to poorly written third party apps than I am with Apple restricting those apps.
Shades of MacOS 8. It's a good thing they're protecting you.
In other words, where I think we differ is that I do not see a need to make every device that is capable of computing into a general purpose device.
No, I think it's where you have a general purpose computing device that you're happy to have locked in simple-mode.
I'd be happy my phone ship in simple-mode, where I couldn't accidentally leave a torrent program running and draining the battery/bandwidth, but I can't imagine why I'd be happy to have a device that could do what I wanted and just wouldn't.
Take $99 from every iPhone developer that submits to Apps store
Isn't it $99 once a year, every year? And don't they force sale of an Intel Mac on each developer as well? (I haven't looked around to see if the suite runs on a hackintosh. It's kind of a scary thing to wonder about in public. The long knives of the mac zealots would probably come out quickly.)
At least with Flash I can block it easily.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.