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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."
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?
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.
yeah but the slashtarts seem to think that if you're employed by one company you have to hate every other company. and they will never hire you either
If you can't beat them, join them.
Do not read this sig.
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.
[
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.
To be fair Flash is a piece of crud, on systems otherwise capable of playing videos, in full screen would use exponentially more CPU usually maxing the cpu/core making the video unwatchable in full screen. The higher your desktop resolution the more exponential cpu power Flash required to scale to fullscreen. It could be worked around by dropping the desktop resolution much lower say 800x600 or even 640x480. Silverlight didn't have any issues with cpu usage scaling to fullscreen. Sure they have gpu acceleration now but I suspect it's just to work around that issue.
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?
Sure they have gpu acceleration now but I suspect it's just to work around that issue.
No GPU acceleration is the fix to the issue, not just a workaround. It's like deriding a 3D engine for having really slow CPU-only rendering and claiming that enabling 3D acceleration is "just a workaround" for a slow 3D engine.
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.
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.
I'll take Rudolph Flash over Adolph Apple.
Whatever merit your argument might have had, it was invalidated by Godwin's law. You lose.
No sig for the moment.
Well, hopefully he'll be in a position to help Apple as much as he helped Adobe.
Well, on an average day I see precisely zero flash content, because I don't even have it installed. :-P
I think he means as in de-facto, as in most people use it but it's not a 'standard' that is enforced.
Unfortunately, most forms of "rich content" on the internet is what has caused me to be uninterested in Flash in the first place -- well, that and the fact that it's been a security hole for well over a decade.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
BS.
Apple didn't need a competing app delivery mechanism to "backdoor" delivery behind the app store.
Adding Adobe's Flash would have done this, while also opening up the "Turing-complete, vulnerability of the week processor" to a stable platform.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It turned out that their preferred design for GPU offload involved decoding H.264 on the GPU, copying the frames back to main memory, compositing them on the CPU, and then copying the resulting frames back to the CPU. As you can imagine, this was a long way from being the fastest possible solution.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The same guys that hired the dude from the down-market UK retail chain... how'd that work out?
Magic's gone.
Cute. Now we have a Godwin's law's nazi police!
The fact that you refuse to look at it doesn't change the fact that it's still what most people use.
No, most people do *not* use it. Most people use Flash. That was his point.
12-hour analog clock is less error-prone than the 24-hour version. If you are willing to go all-digital then this advantage disappears.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out. No non-apple apps were allowed to use those hidden APIs, including competing video editing suites (Like Avid or Adobe's suite).
As soon as the APIs became available in 10.8, Adobe started using them. They decode encrypted traffic and then write them to the GPU buffers, like the API allows them. It is still slower than the Windows (and Linux) implementation, but it is what they have to use in order to use the PUBLIC APIs that Apple offered.
-Nick
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.
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.
Executives employed by companies try to make those companies do well.
...unless that executive is named Stephen Elop, Steven Ballmer, or Leo Apotheker. ;)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This guy is willing to go to the mat with vitriolic lies to defend his company's inferior technology in a world that is moving beyond it. What other qualifications does he need to work at the new Apple?
Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out.
That didn't stop VLC from running fast on the same hardware, though, and I don't think they were privy to any special secret API. And even if they were, Adobe could have examined the open source project to see how it was calling the not-so-secret API.
No, Flash was dog slow on its own merits.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To be fair, Flash on the N800 *was* a battery hog that substantially impacted performance. On the other hand, the N800 could use FlashBlock and/or AdBlock Plus, so you could get all the benefits of Flash (I used to use it to stream from Pandora, for example) without the downsides (slow ad networks impacting browsing performance, annoying animations leaping out at you, pages slowing down while the CPU struggles with Flash, etc.)
At the time that I was messing with the N800 (Maemo OS2008 had just come out, I think), the fact that the iPhone could play YouTube vides was a big freaking deal... but the N800 could play not just YouTube, but any other Flash videos online and didn't need to switch apps to do it, either. It could also play (many) Flash games, navigate Flash-based websites, and so on. For a device that was also largely sold on the quality of its mobile browsing experience, the iPhone browser was lame compared to the OS2008 browser (Gecko-based - previous versions had been Opera-based - and extensible).
Of course, despite its screen being smaller and lower-resolution, the iPhone did have one notable advantage over the N800: capacitive touchscreen vs. resistive touchscreen. Resistive has some perks, like the ability to be really precise with a stylus (though the handwriting recognition was "meh" at best), but it had no multitouch capability and required the application of non-trivial pressure, which over time could damage the screen surface a bit.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Godwin's law says nothing of the validity of an argument--merely that the longer a debate rages, the more likely one side is to compare the other to Nazis or Hitler.
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
I read that analogy 3 times and I still don't get it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
This is a point many don't understand. An open source application uses Apple's APIs correctly while Adobe could not. I think that this had to do with how Adobe coded Flash. Since they wanted it to be universal, they may have simply ported sections of code from Windows that handled decoding/coding without out actually looking at the API and using the standard calls.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Look at a 24 hour clock when you are too far from the numbers. Tell me the time. Now repeat with a 12-hour clock.
Alternately, how many 24-hour analog wristwatches do you encounter? They exist, but what a PITA. When you do find one, look how enormous they make the numbers, often only printing every other. This is because you need to be able to read the numbers to make the clock usable.
The military uses 24-hour time to remove the ambiguous AM/PM nature of the 12-hour clock. And for the past 30 years, they can put digital clocks everywhere so the accuracy problem goes away.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The way I read it jjjhs is suggesting that Flash using GPU acceleration for video is "just a workaround" for slow non-GPU accelerated video when obviously non-GPU full screen video is going to be CPU intensive and using GPU acceleration is the only solution.
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.
Said no one ever. 24h system more error-prone?
Well, I suppose it is. If you stop a 24-hour clock, it'll be right once a day. If you stop a 12-hour clock, it'll be twice as accurate. ;)
No - Flash is a piece of crud on YOUR system, which given the symptoms (maxed CPU, video unwatchable) and the primary audience of Slashdot is most likely Linux. To be fair I understand; when I used to use Linux, Flash was definitely less developed and performed substantially when compared to Windows. Heck, even Flash on OS X performs worse compared to Windows. Clearly Adobe believed Windows was their primary concern and hence developed all their efforts to accelerating things there, and given the fact Linux has been abandoned several releases ago on Linux, there's no surprise Linux performance is shit.
Why is why I use Windows. It's where everyone focuses their attention, and until Flash disappears entirely from the net that's going to be the case for a long time.
Goddamn that post was a mess; I meant to say Flash performed substantially WORSE on Linux compared to Windows, and that Flash has been abandoned several releases ago on Linux.
Maybe I'm just raging about how Linux just sucks as a desktop OS compared to Windows for these very reasons - why to be fair aren't problems with Linux per se, but rather a fact of life that impinges on its usefulness.
How quickly they forget. When the iPhone was announced, there was no app store and no plans for an SDK. Jobs said that you should make web apps. Maybe there were secret plans for an SDK but that was the official story for some time.
This isn't exactly true, though, a lot of people keep repeating it.
Fact is, there are well written flash apps and poorly written ones. The same can be said of javascript, I have gone to some "cutting edge" HTML5 pages and had them bog my browser down as well. Writing shitty code isn't limited to flash developers!
I'm not saying flash is great, I'm just saying this particular argument is kind of bullshit and no-one really thinks it through.
In a way I kind of like that flash is around still because advertisers still use it so if you block flash you block all that nonsense. Once advertisers catch on and switch to all HTML5 ads will be more tricky to block.
It's more likely to be a legal concern. Big corps like Adobe have teams of uptight lawyers that stop them from doing anything even remotely legally questionable.
Calling undocumented API's "just because some dudes on an open source project do it" is not a legally defensible position.
Flash ran like shit on Mac's, for sure. Ran great on Windows, generally. I have no idea what Linux users were/are forced to endure.
How is it undocumented that an open source application can use it? From what I can see Adobe simply chose to port their code from Windows directly rather than using the API correctly. And this was all Flash. If you take a H.264 movie, you can play it using QuickTime or VLC and the CPU barely spikes. Take that same movie and wrap it in a Flash container and then it will take an entire core to run it. It seems as if Adobe isn't using the GPU at all and didn't make the necessary API calls. Instead it is relying on the CPU for everything.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Tale, told by idiot. I don't know why I don't have these problems with flash... oh, yes I do. I have an nVidia graphics card. Flash works fine on my Linux system and has for a lot of years. And virtually all the video I see is flash video.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whatever merit your argument might have had, it was invalidated by Godwin's law. You lose.
Godwin's law doesn't say that if you invoke Hitler, you lose. Consequently, you lose. It's incredibly hyperbolic to invoke Hitler in this context, but that doesn't mean that the point is invalid. It only means that any response may reasonably be accompanied by a lot of eye-rolling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GPU acceleration is broken on my Snow Leopard MBP with full screen HD video (screen goes black when switching to full screen). The fix is to disable GPU acceleration. Thanks Adobe!
It certainly is. But...
It also performs better than HTML5 + javascript. If you create an animation or game, it requires a MUCH beefier computer to run it at the same level in HTML5 as in flash. So, doesn't that mean HTML5 is even more of a resource hog?
Although I'll concede flash is buggier.
Maybe this is just their first move to embrace change. :)
Go back and read the original part of this subthread. The point was that when flash was originally ported those API's were undocumented / secret, and it was only after awhile they became available, at which point Adobe started using them.
BS.
Apple didn't need a competing app delivery mechanism to "backdoor" delivery behind the app store.
What "App Store"? There was no App Store when the iPhone was started. There was no way to install apps on it either.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Except, the APIs were not public until AFTER this entire kerfufle came out. No non-apple apps were allowed to use those hidden APIs, including competing video editing suites (Like Avid or Adobe's suite).
As soon as the APIs became available in 10.8, Adobe started using them. They decode encrypted traffic and then write them to the GPU buffers, like the API allows them. It is still slower than the Windows (and Linux) implementation, but it is what they have to use in order to use the PUBLIC APIs that Apple offered.
-Nick
You know, this whining about hidden video playback APIs was never able to explain why the whole fucking rest of Flash was so damn slow on Macs. And Linux for that matter.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ah yes, the good old "if I'm not having a problem, then the problem doesn't exist" idiocracy way too many Linux fanboys have. How exactly does that logic fit?
Ah yes, the good old "if I'm not having a problem, then the problem doesn't exist" idiocracy way too many Linux fanboys have. How exactly does that logic fit?
It's not that the problem doesn't exist, but the solution is to buy hardware that doesn't suck. Windows doesn't work if you buy the wrong hardware, either. The problem isn't that Flash doesn't work on Linux, the problem is that Flash doesn't work on shitty hardware on Linux.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No they were not. Adobe in trying to make Flash universal is not using the GPU calls correctly. In keeping with how Windows does things, they didn't change the behavior of Flash and making the CPU work instead of the GPU. And again, how secret were these APIs that an open source application can use them? That's like saying that there are secret books at your local library that anyone can check out. But it must be true because someone else said it. Never mind that it doesn't pass a logical test.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
I've heard that line way too many times and it simply doesn't work well in practice. When people buy hardware, they don't check compatibility with Linux because they've never had to do so with Windows. Why would people want to expend more effort when they aren't required to? That's basically going backwards.
Furthermore, it's not always easy. For example my computer motherboard has a Renesas USB 3 controller for two of my USB ports. In Windows they work fine... with the drivers installed of course. In Linux there's a reported incompatabiliy with that particular controller chip I'm using (can't remember the exact lsusb output) that results in an inability to detect things like external USB3 HDDs unless they're connected during bootup - plugging them in during a running session doesn't work. No-one has a fix, cos no-one looks after the edge cases except for the manufacturer.
Yes it's the manufacturer's fault because they obviously doesn't give a shit about Linux. I know this, you know this. But people (including myself) don't care who's fault it is because in the end, it means I can't use my USB3 ports to back up my rather large storage drive every so often like I do in Windows, not unless I want to wait for over 24 hours. And I don't, which makes Linux less capable than Windows FOR ME.
I've heard that line way too many times and it simply doesn't work well in practice. When people buy hardware, they don't check compatibility with Linux because they've never had to do so with Windows. Why would people want to expend more effort when they aren't required to? That's basically going backwards.
But that's not true. People do have to check compatibility with Windows, especially for their old hardware. For many people, a new version of windows means all new peripherals, like printers and scanners.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Depends how old the peripherals are. Windows 8 can use Vista drivers for a lot of things since they share the same driver format, so as long as they were made around 2006 onwards they should still be supported. Occasionally there are driver sets killed off from the Linux kernel for lack of support or interest, so it EOLing hardware happens everywhere.
As for new hardware, I still disagree that you need to check compatibility with Windows because, well... no-one is going to be selling consumer level hardware if it cannot be used with Windows. Unless you're using XP perhaps, and even then it's likely you're aware that an OS from 2001 is probably not in the forefront of manufacturer's minds anymore.
I suspect we could go backwards and forwards on this for a while - you'll say that Linux supports more hardware out of the box, I'll say that it's more important that the drivers exist in the first place; I'd rather deal with something that's not supported OOTB but still be able to download the driver and install it via Next, Next, Finish, compared to not having it available at all, which is sometimes the case in Linux.
And frankly, the Flash debate has run for nearly a decade now. I think I'm justified in enacted Godwin's Law.
Really, I don't see much difference between Hitler's attempt at controlling people. And Apple's attempt at controlling software on iOS.