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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
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; }
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?!
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.
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!
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
To prevent horrible, battery-sucking shovelware from showing up on the iPhone/iPad.
You never looked in the AppStore right? For every decent app there are at least 500 garbage apps out there.
Apple does not want its users having unsatisfactory experiences playing their Flash games, and then subsequently blaming Apple for the bad UI.
Because iTunes for Windows and the plethora of crapware in AppStore is such an amazing user experience?
You can debate the morality of what Apple is doing (personally, I think it sucks) but the reasons are pretty clear
Apple is lying why they don't want to allow cross compilers. The reason is simple: lock in users to maintain the very high profit margins on iDevices. Nothing to do with quality of cross compiled and/or flash apps nor user experience.
Disclosure: I have an iPhone 3Gs.
This is insightful? What's the insight? Do you know anything about HTML5? Apple is helping build an open web that proprietary devices from any company can connect to. How is an open standard such as HTML an Apple only web experience? The reality is exactly the opposite. Right now we have a situation where one company, Adobe, determines what web experience (if you're talking about Flash) you get on any given device or platform. Compare that to an open HTML5 rendering engine (webkit), and a push towards open web standards. In what universe does that add up to that being an Apple only experience?
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
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?
... 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.
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.