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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Cute. Now we have a Godwin's law's nazi police!
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.
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?
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.
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.