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Apple Hires Former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, Destroyer of iPhones
Nerval's Lobster writes "Why did Apple hire former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as vice president of technology? Adobe and Apple spent years fighting a much-publicized battle over the latter's decision to ban Adobe Flash from iOS devices. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability and performance. Lynch was very much the public face of Adobe's public-relations pushback to Apple's criticism; in a corporate video shot for an Adobe developer conference in 2009, he even helped run an iPhone over with a steamroller. (Hat tip to Daring Fireball's John Gruber for digging that video up.) As recently as 2010, he was still arguing that Flash was superior to HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content. It's interesting to speculate whether Steve Jobs would have hired someone who so publicly denigrated Apple's flagship product. But Jobs is dead, and his corporate successors in Cupertino—tasked with leading Apple through a period of fierce competition — obviously looked at Lynch and decided he'd make a perfect fit as an executive."
iPhone did not have the resources to run Flash, so Steve Jobs "banned" it to avoid making the iPhone look like the piece of shit that it was.
Executives employed by companies try to make those companies do well.
Film at 11.
It's some type of bizarre, marital Game of Thrones type alliance with Adobe royalty marrying into Apple where they'll conceive who knows what?
Oracle buying companies (PeopleSoft, BEA, Siebel, Sun Micro) that they've been engaged in a public pissing match with for many years prior to the acquisition. And I think I recall reading that similar happened during the great era of US robber barons after the Civil War.
In other words, capitalism as usual.
Hello 1985 how the hell have you been?
Do you believe that everyone has a brand loyalty problem? A professional can see beyond all of this kind of noise while exploiting it to their will at the same time.
It reminds me of a DJ from a classic rock station who got let go, he went on to a country station and was in all their ads about how the "new country" music was exciting and great. I know someone who met him and talked about it and the DJ's reply was along the lines of "It's just another gig. It's my job to make it sound like something you'll want to listen to." This really is no different. Even fanboys who are forced to move on eventually shrug off their old brand and act like whatever they were forced into is the best thing going. Some people thrive on making what they own is the best even if they know it isn't.
Meh.
If you can't beat them, join them.
Do not read this sig.
I'm sure all his butthurt over Apple and flash don't matter now that Apple is going to pay him top dollar. Plus Adobe is a wreck of a company, imo.
Be seeing you...
Just announced: iPhones will now feature a permanent pop-up message that says "A new version of the IOS is available, do you want to install?"
HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content
I would disagree. Flash is still very much the de facto standard, like it or not.
Maybe it's as simple as Jobs' advice to Cook: "I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what's right."
Or maybe it's a cheap way to buy out an antagonist, let him spin his wheels in a harm-free zone for a couple years, and do what Apple does with less angst.
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This summary is saying, "I won't choose you for me team because you scored lots of points against me. Politicians and execs don't really "care" about things. They are professionals doing a job.
For years, Adobe has been a black hole of technological innovation. I think the bigger question is why anyone at Apple would even consider hiring anyone from Adobe to be their CTO? What's next? Hiring leadership from within RIM to be the president of Apple's mobile division?
This story makes me remember another Technology clash.
Once, some well known "C" developer, post an article about the current version of the Pascal programming version. Contrary to the Pascal community beliefs, the article had a lot of good critical points.
So, the main "Pascal" developer, added or changed features, and, the newer versions, allow to do everything, that was missing.
So, the ex-Adobe guy seems to be hired as a "iPhone Quality Assurance auditor".
Just my 2 cents...
At the end of the day these guys usually are not much more than figureheads. They institute a vague vision and ambiguous goal that is mostly reactive to industry trends. It's the people beneath them who do the real thinking, who worry about specifics, implementation and execution. The only real benefit they bring is that they have intimate knowledge of the process, philosophy and goals of their previous employer.
What else does he really bring to the table?
I trust this doesn't mean they'll be bringing Flash back though *shudder*
It's one of those interesting points with Steve Jobs. At the time, the decision seemed awful and a lot of people were cheering on alternatives such as Android for including it. But a couple of years on it would seem that many share my view of: hey, he was right! Flash IS an awful resource drain, and because of him banning it from iOS there's been great progress towards HTML5 and the drive for efficiency. I seem to recall even Adobe have agreed it's the correct move at this point. Android has had Flash for a while but the latest versions have dropped it. It'd be so ironic if (unlikely) iOS gained Flash and everyone flocked to Android to get away from it this time.
Do not be offended. Rolling over pretty much ANYTHING with a steam roller is way cool.
"HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content"
On an average day I see lots more Flash content than HTML5 (sometimes none). I don't know what you mean with "virtual industry standard".
none
Slashdot tells the betas, once again, "ignore that man behind the curtain". Dear lord, do you really fall for such simplistic plays?
Oh, no- Apple is employing a guy who ran over an iPhone with a steamroller, dribble, dribble. Always focus on the mask, and never what is beneath the mask, dribble, dribble. Even Slashdot betas cannot be this stupid, surely.
The people that run companies are NEVER the true enemies of one another. They consider themselves as members of a superior tribe. Sure, like real generals, they will fight to the death against their opponent at time of war. They will say to their cannon-fodder soldiers "our side is obviously the good guys, their side is obviously the bad guys"- whatever gets the moron sheep into a state that will allow them to sacrifice their lives for the pure profit of their masters.
Perhaps sports teams will make for a better analogy for you Slashdot types. Does Team A refuse to employ the best talent from Team B just because Team B always strove to best Team A, and always 'bad mouthed' them at the same time? Why then would Slashdot suggest that different principles apply in business. Why are the owners of Slashdot always treating you like dummies?
That was just PR to keep the masses thinking Apple was on their side. The real reason they ddin't support Flash was because it was a code interpreter. i.e. It let you run external code. That meant if iOS supported Flash, you could use it to run apps on your iOS device without having gotten them via the App Store.
At the time, Apple had a very strict policy against code interpreters. They've loosened their stance somewhat since then, but it's still pretty restrictive. It's their garden, and they want to keep it walled off. On the one hand this does improve the security of their devices somewhat. On the other it means all executables which are bought and sold for the device have to go through their App Store and 30% cut.
Battery life, reliability, and performance were all red herrings because in most Android browsers, the Flash plugin wouldn't play by default. If you went to a web page with embedded Flash, an image of a stylized F would show up in its place, and you had to click on it before the Flash would actually play. No hit to the device's performance unless you specifically wanted the Flash to play.
So the obituary for flash is premature.
How is this any different from a lay person at Adobe switching over to Apple or vise versa? People go from one employer to another all the time anymore, so what? I guess the only thing that's notable is that we have a cool video of an iphone getting crushed, but that was just marketing.
It is obvious, I think. Mr Lynch will continue to destroy iPhones. He will have a squad of Apple goons, who will invade peoples homes to destroy any iPhone older than two years old, so that people will be forced to buy new iPhones to keep the revenue stream up. They tested this concept out with the iPhone prototype debacles, and found that the local police would be willing to look the other way when Constitutional rights were being violated.
The same guys that hired the dude from the down-market UK retail chain... how'd that work out?
Magic's gone.
So fucking retarded Apple/android and the rest of them can't include flash by default in the OS. It's a proven technology that works.
You know what though? I think Steve Jobs was eventually be on board with flash, because as SOON as he died, like the very next day, apple announced they were officially never going to support flash on Iphone..
those greedy little niggers..
Apple didn't want Flash because the non x86 version that Adobe was willing to release (Flash Light) was crap hardly more useful than Gnash (and without the excuse of having to retroingenier everything). ...)
And cost money, and would discourage the developper to make the extra efforts to really use the capacities of the phone vs. using the minimum that "makes it work" and then see if there is a market (and oups there is none because the app is crap, so a case of nice self fulfilling profecy
This said, Adobe and Apple share the same goals and expertise in vendor lock-in, so Lynch is a perfect fit for them, you didn't expect them to hire RMS did you ?
Flash, by itself, can do wonderful things. Unfortunately, it's a CPU and power draining fiend. It's not Flash itself that Jobs hated, but the fact it made tablets a lot less useable. Maybe they are looking for some sort of middle ground.
Everyone is fixated on Adobe's obvious failings and not their past strengths. The only thing Adobe has done competently is make tools and content distribution tools (video hosting servers with DRM) that come with vendor lock-in. Apple want to make it's iBook SDK really good so developers use it, and difficult to port away from so consumers continue to buy iPads. Apple may also want to start pushing QuickTime again as a YouTube competitor now that YouTube is entering the paid content market. On my iDevice, I get most of my video content through YouTube and HTML5 tags, both of which are probably too available to Android devices for Apple's taste.
They currently have the manufacturing guy running the show. This decision shows how dumb they have become.
Engineering-wise, Adobe is the worst company in the entire software industry. Their faulty software is the Go-To API for Chinese intel to write viruses against. Either PDF or Flash, both is horribly broken and used on a regular basis to spear-phish critical targets from Lockheed to Rolls-Royce. They were highly successful using that tactic.
Steve Jobs was 100% correct to boot out their crapware, based on the actual security situation. He was also correct to point out that Flash player is very inefficient in rendering videos, which is quite important for battery-powered devices. Needless extra CPU cycles needlessly eat energy and therefore runtime between recharging.
I always knew Apple would be stuffed after Steve Jobs and this means I am right.
Once, some well known "C" developer, post an article about the current version of the Pascal programming version. Contrary to the Pascal community beliefs, the article had a lot of good critical points.
So, the main "Pascal" developer, added or changed features, and, the newer versions, allow to do everything, that was missing.
This sounds like a garbled reference to Kernighan's Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language. The title is drily amusing, and the points made in the article are technically true, but I can't help thinking that the dissing of Pascal is a bit disingenuous and/or missing the point. The language wasn't even designed for system programming, but as a teaching aid. Its popularity far outside the original remit just underscores the dearth of sane high-level languages at the time.
Anyway, Wirth didn't tweak Pascal; he designed a completely new language, Modula-2, which, by the way, happened before Kernighan's article.
Actually, the highly successful HP MPE operating system was coded in a Pascal variant. MPE was eventually built out into (effectively) a mainframe operating system and HP had many highly loyal customers. MPE could handle tens of thousands of terminals on a big machine.
Then MPE was killed because Oracle demanded it to be killed in exchange for Oracle on HP-UX. The traitors who ran HP after the death of Dave Packard did that.
Pascal can indeed do pointers, so I can't see why C would be systematically superior.
You just need to do a simple substitution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfSXhMzWoA4
must become
https://www.youtube.com/embed/wfSXhMzWoA4
Then it works without the Chinese intel API aka "Flash".
Someone would have made a analogy of sports stars moving from one team to its hated rival for a pot of $$$.
/., no one thought about sports.
However, being
As recently as 2010, he was still arguing that Flash was superior to HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content.
What? Surpassed? When? HTML5 has a long way to go before it properly uproots Flash. We've been hearing that Flash is dead for years and years now, and yet aside from the mobile space (which admittedly has grown considerably), Flash is still pretty much on top in the PC space. I wait in earnest for HTML5 to be the flash killing beast it is portrayed as, but that time has not come yet... There is still much work to be done.
Lynch is a CTO who took a desktop-based software company with incredible institutional inertia and reoriented it towards cloud services in record time.
Here's a quote I read somewhere else: "Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is getting better at services." Apple has sucked at services from day one, iDisk, MobileMe, iCloud, whatever, it's all shit. It needs someone to sort that out - maybe Lynch is the guy they picked.
Maybe this is just their first move to embrace change. :)
Adobe didn't write Flash, they acquired Macromedia in 2005 who originally wrote Flash. The original intent of Flash was to provide an animation platform. It was during the video player codec wars where you needed to have RealPlayer, QuickTime, Windows Media Player and many more as every other website used a different format to play the video files. Flash added the ability to be a video player and started to be used by many sites to playback video as most users had Flash installed. At some point YouTube came on the scene and that sealed the deal, everyone switched in fast order to using Flash rather than to make users download different players and upgrade them. So this effectively ended the codec player wars. Then Adobe added DRM technology to Flash to encrypt and protect video streams.
Flash is horribly, horribly broken! From 6/2001 -> 3/12/2013 there have been 96 security patches released to fix vulnerabilities that could allow a PC/Mac/Linux computer to be compromised! http://www.adobe.com/support/security/#flashplayer
Flash is very inefficient and buggy, hence the serious flaws in it's design that are the root cause for all the exploits. It has got to be truly awful code under the hood! Flash never ran well on Mac's and once it was ported to Mac OS X (carbon) that didn't improve much. Flash had been identified by Apple as causing Mac's to crash and run poorly. The iPhone and iPad run iOS which is really Mac OS X recompiled to run on ARM instead of PowerPC/Intel. iOS is stripped down but it's still the base Unix system that came from NeXT. Not only would Flash kill the batteries of mobile devices, it would introduce extremely dangerous vulnerabilities to a very secure system.
What is amazing is during the battle between Apple and Adobe, Flash was supposed to ship on other non-Apple mobile platforms. Well lately, Adobe has completely killed Flash for all mobile platforms! Apparently, the facts caught up to the hype.
Today, Apple doesn't ship Flash nor Java for that matter on new Mac's as both are security risks. Oracle's had it's share of Java security issues lately as well. Apple literally blocks Flash and Java in Safari by remotely updating Mac's outside of the Software Update utility using their proprietary anti-malware system. Say a new vulnerability on Flash or Java is discovered, Apple quickly sends an anti-malware update to all online Mac's which then proceed to disable the plugins for Safari until the version is newer and that version hasn't even been released yet by Oracle nor Adobe. This has happened repeatedly over the last year.
As to Kevin Lynch, he was acting as a spokesman for Adobe and was following the companies party line. Yep, he was very much like Bagdad Bob! Spewing out company propaganda. Executives, come and go all the time. Mark Hurd was terminated from HP but ended up at Oracle.