Go use Flash somewhere else then, or don't use it. I don't really care about Flash. It means absolutely nothing to me.
Your conclusions are all wrong anyway. Microsoft was busy suing or crushing everyone to get what they wanted. The Flash exploits aren't Trojan horses - if you wait long enough, you'll get hit. Apple did do something about Flash on the desktop - they sandboxed it so it wouldn't take the browser down anymore when it predictably crashed. All you have to do is wait long enough and Flash crashes.
A meter to see how big a dent Flash puts in your battery? Brilliant. They do have a battery meter on the iDevices. If they had Flash, there would be a race between what hits first - the bottom of the battery or the end of the movie. People get 11 hours of HTML5 movie watching on an iPad. That's all the meter they need.
I say Apple good, Android potentially better except for where the overlords are suddenly taking it. They're turning that greatness into a cesspool. There are plenty of fart apps for Android too, so just get over it already.
Ok, I've got a better hold on the perspective and your frustration is certainly valid. Equally valid is the frustration of waiting for Adobe to get their act together to make their software work. Apple has a long history of being held back by Adobe's foot dragging. Why in the world would they hand over virtual control of their iPlatform (through thousands of 3rd party apps) to a company proven to be unreliable in executing on new advances? If Apple enabled a new set of API's, how long until Adobe gets around to using any portion of it so the platform appears to advance? Apple has been there, done that and burned the T-shirt with Adobe. OS X has been out for 10 years and Adobe just started using the native development environment in limited circumstances.
Apple shouldn't wait for Adobe any more than Microsoft should wait for Sony to ship new technology for the XBox.
To give an example of Adobe's sloth, OS X has had the inner workings of PDF built into the OS for the last decade. Everything you cut, copied and pasted was PDF compliant vector art on the clipboard. If you did a screen shot, it showed up as a PDF by default (it's a PNG now but that's easily changed in the command line). You could open the screen shot PDF with an Adobe product in layers. You could drag and drop vector art between dissimilar software. Anything you printed had the option of outputting PDF compliant vector files, also editable with Adobe software. I copied some cells from an Excel spreadsheet and pasted them into Illustrator and they showed up as vector art grid lines with editable text and the right font inside. I almost fell over. That was OS X at work. Basically, if Adobe were to write an OS, this would be it. Adobe could have advanced their software suites with real low level integration like they could never dream of before. Adobe didn't even care. It was impossible to achieve parity on Windows with these functions, so Adobe held back all of their software to the lowest common denominator. Because of this, you can think of Apple's reaction to Flash as payback. If it were your decision at Apple, you would decide it's irresponsible to rely on Adobe to any depth because of advances they don't take advantage of.
Well, like it or not, Apple products have only started their upward trend in the consumer [and corporate] space and Apple's choices will have a ripple effect for everything there. I don't think it's muscling the industry, it seems more like creating a [successful] ecosystem and inviting anyone to join it - or bypass it. Apple has a development environment that unfortunately doesn't include compiled Flash - or more likely in the long run, fortunately doesn't include compiled Flash. If you can name something significant that can only be accomplished with compiled Flash (other than being able to port the software around), there might be an argument. Otherwise, Apple's not going to hang their platform on a proven unreliable 3rd party.
Of course, there's Android which does allow this. Making it hard to write an app in Flash to cover both platforms will send developers like you to making a choice - and you should make the choice that suits you best. Recently, that one hope to have a competitor to the iDevices has been dramatically diluted. Google has suddenly sold out to Verizon and reversed the trend of platform providers gaining control of their systems from carriers. Everyone is going to buy their subsidized devices through carriers because it's cheaper. With it will come all the bloatware and restrictions the carriers wish to impose, even if it is Android. Verizon will bill the user for every keystroke they put into that compiled Flash app of yours and not care if they can see the output through all the ads blowing at them. As a user, I don't want that. Nobody knows how it will play out. Me and several 100 million other people are not likely to encounter anything you've written and Flash is potentially the Netscape Navigator of this decade. Or not.
Now, if Apple bought Adobe, which they easily could, all of this could change. Who knows what Windows Mobile 7 or whatever it's called will bring, but that's still a few years off.
Apparently, "every tactic Microsoft ever used" is not really the strong part of your perspective, nor is the understanding of what a monopolist is. Microsoft would "partner" with countless technology companies hopeful of riding on Microsoft's coattails into wild profits. What they quickly discovered is Microsoft taking their technologies, modifying them a little to be "Windows Only" and re-releasing it en masse. This made the original technology irrelevant, the original file formats incompatible with anything else and the original company usually perished. That's what monopoly power did for Microsoft. They could dictate terms of nearly anything to any company under threat of getting squashed by destroying their ability to interoperate.
This is very different. Apple is protective of their own platform but they're doing nothing to damage Flash or the Internet. If they were Microsoftish about it, they would "partner" with Adobe, get them to rework Flash to only work on Macs and the iDevices and re-release it so everyone else would see a blank screen on the Internet. Same with WebKit - following the Microsoft model, they would poison WebKit to only work with Apple products, give away free matching server software and web dev tools to everyone in order to make the Internet say "You must use Safari to view this web site". That's not happening with Apple but that's exactly what Microsoft did with IE.
What Apple is doing is rejecting this kind of behavior on its own platform and taking their chances. It would be one thing to suddenly dump compatible Flash and seamlessly replace it with their own Flash-like technology once the iPhone gained enough market share. That would be the Microsoft method like they did with Java. Instead, Apple rejected Flash right from the start when the iPhone and the iPad had exactly zero market share. Despite that, these products are huge sellers anyway.
There's a message in there - many millions of people are perfectly happy without Flash. The iPhone has the highest satisfaction rating of all mobile devices. Approved apps sounds good to me if it does what I want, doesn't crash my phone, eat my battery or steal my data. If Google wants to allow all that, more power to them. However, Apple, at their own peril, is hoping that developers will also reject the proprietary Internet in favor of more open technologies available to everyone. This is bad for Adobe and Flash but there are a few ways to escape this problem for Adobe; start making viable HTML5 development tools or get Flash to actually work without smoking your battery and release it as an open source product. Apple would probably warm up to that.
Adobe already makes other proprietary software like Photoshop, but the files it saves are easily decoded and capable of exchange with competing products. That's how it should work. It doesn't matter that the software itself is proprietary as long as it interoperates with standardized file formats or on the Internet. That's what a healthy development environment should strive for, not some proprietary digital glop like Flash.
If you're upset about anything, it's what Google and Verizon are cooking up for that "open" platform called Android. They took a potentially great system like that and immediately locked it down against anyone actually using it like Linux. It's looking open for the carriers to shove whatever they want into Android but not for the users to do anything about it. Get ready for the Google advertising fire hose to invade your Droid and for Verizon to figure out how to sell your own pictures back to you. The crap over Flash on the iPhone is nothing compared to that.
The intentions are likely different from what you're thinking. I don't believe anyone really sets out to become a monopolist and Jobs is no exception. He appears to be removing the things which have treated his platform badly and is replacing them with two things - standards based technologies and platform specific technologies. You can use either. Calling Flash a healthy development environment is a laugh since it has become one of the most resource hungry attack vectors of recent memory. If Apple made huge profits off their App Store, I could see why they'd want to protect it from end runs. It appears the revenue from the App Store Is healthy but is a drop in the bucket compared to the profit from selling products that don't confound the end user... Or kill their batteries in an hour... or don't work well with touch devices anyway. If Flash didn't have the long list of failings, I think it would be on the iDevices. The fact that it isn't in its current state is a favor to the end user.
Everything people complain about and point at for being monopolistic from Apple has an escape hatch for the end user. Apple has every right to monopolize their own offerings and is under no obligation to support things which harm their offerings. That said, Apple is far from a monopoly.
The iPod is first and foremost an MP3 player. Purchases from iTunes with DRM may be recorded to CD and used anywhere else. The Mac has some proprietary pieces but I can compile and run damn near anything on it.
The Walled Garden complaints are understandable but interesting in that none of my exploit laden PC viruses will run on my Macs or iDevices but cause the IT department at work to lock down my network and computers nearly to the point of being non-functional. Ironically, I feel like I have more freedom inside that walled garden because of that.
That's kind of the point. Some people like to work on things all the time and some people just like things that work. Getting back to agreeable standards can only help things work better.
@DavidApi "The web (Internet) was supposed to provide a platform *snip* And that means HTML. Not Flash, or Silverlight, or even Java Applets."
You're my fscking hero! Why cater to 80% of the customers with proprietary things when you can cater to 100% of the customers with standards based things? That leaves out Flash, Silverlight (gag), and [sadly] even Java Applets. Die Flash, Die!... and Silverlight too (the last gasp of Windows Media).
The proprietary part of this whole argument is Flash and the geeks are moaning about it not being supported? Holy crap, Batman! Almost nothing good has ever come through Flash on my browsers.
"thats' really an indication of your skill, not the platform"
I'd have to side with @jythie on this one.
I came from a video post production house heavy with Mac workstations and now work at a major network channel that's very Windosey. My god - I truly can't understand the world's sad devotion to Windows. I hardly ever heard from the 60 Mac users at my last job and now I spend most of my day keeping a few dozen HP 360 and 380 shitboxes connected, booted and trying to finish the work you ask them to do. There's always something falling apart on these systems and they're slow as ass.
There's also a Mac graphics department with 12 machines. I MIGHT spend an hour a MONTH maintaining ALL of them put together.
My two year old 8-core Mac Pro at home can run rings around the 12-core HP 380 G6 server at work. On top of that, the people here THINK THAT'S HOW COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK and keep buying them. Cripes.
On top of that, I'm sure I only spent half the money on all the Mac servers and workstations as they spent on this stuff.
There's something to this OS X thing. I wouldn't write it off so fast.
Meanwhile the "experts" at the Apple store tell customers that their machines "can't get viruses because they're built different". Seriously - this was overheard at one of their stores and it's mind boggling.
You know the difference between a virus and a trojan, no?
Sorry to burst your bubble, AC, but it's a fact that probably 100 people at the company I work for have changed to Macs at home in the last four years. Their first exposure was here. One came in and said "Macs? Why are you using Macs? Why do they even exist?" Within a year, he bought a MacBook Pro and now freelances using an 8-core Mac Pro (audio mixer). About half of the rest were combative Windows users (as opposed to open minded Windows users). That doesn't count about 25% of new people who already owned Macs.
New Mac users usually fail because they try using Windows chops on the Mac.
"Where's the damn My Documents folder?"
- "Well, there's a Documents folder, so lets rename it to My Documents. Is that better?" "So, what do I do with THAT now?"
- "You could try dragging your documents into it."
They get over it pretty quickly. Most of them have drop kicked their home PC and bought Macs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "made its way through quicktime" but if you're trying to imply that quicktime is used at any level in professional film, video or music production you are wrong.
I'd dare say you know nothing about professional film, video or music. You'll need to account for the fact that nearly half of the media you see every day is run through Final Cut Pro, a nice front end for editing XML files which manipulate QuickTime movies... on a Mac. There is no Windows version, there is no Linux version. Less than a quarter of professional media is done on Avids. That's not to say Avid doesn't have a strong presence in the market, it means the market has gotten gigantic in the last decade (mostly due to Final Cut) and the Avid share has been dwarfed in place. There are a few other systems of course, like Quantel, but they're insignificant when compared to the power of The Force.
Windows software on my Mac Pro (8-core 3.2Ghz Xeon) under Parallels is faster than running natively on PC hardware, namely an HP x8600 8-core 3.16Ghz Xeon (I think I've got the speed right) owned by a friend. Rendering an hour of MPEG2 video using the same software (CineVision) takes over 2 hours on his PC and just north of an hour on my Mac.
One thing I've done is put my virtual machine drives on a fast RAID (8x Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives + RocketRAID 2322). That array pushes over 600MB/sec. Windows XP boots in about 20 seconds (the native PC takes over a minute). Now, my friend is buying Macs to run Windows. He gets more done and doesn't struggle with trying to put host adapters in the PC which never seem to work (eSATA cards, video cards, Firewire cards etc). Parallels sees all the required hardware right through the host system (the dongles, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT required by Scenarist under the PC, the RocketRAID card etc).
I beat a speeding ticket in New Shrewsbury N.J. (back in the Nixon administration) by going to the police station and requesting to see their FCC license to operate the radar. After an hour of three people tossing filing cabinets, getting more and more worried that they actually didn't have one, they found it. The license had expired two months before and I suggested they reverse all the speeding tickets they had issued during the expiration period. They sincerely thanked me for that exercise.
Everyone should spend a week driving the Autobahn. If you're not actively passing someone, you had better be in the right lane. If you're in the left lane, as most Americans believe is their entitlement, you're likely to get plowed by (in this order) a Mercedes, an Audi and a Volkswagen. Keep right except to pass, please.
Yes, that's what the "driver error" camp had come up with as one likely fix for the cause. I don't know about that one. Forty years after the introduction of the Hydra-Matic transmission, suddenly people are confused about when to step on the gas and shift into drive? A silent modification on the post "60 Minutes" Audis was to put a steel plate as a guard over the accelerator linkage rod behind the brake pedal. Having owned a pile of Audis through that era, I'd have to say my later ones with the steel plate prevented accidental contact with the accelerator link. It was an incredibly dumb design to start with. Might as well put the power window and ejection seat buttons next to each other.
Oh, yeah... if you stand on the brakes, the engine isn't pushing you anywhere. If you're driving along and catch that accelerator linkage with your brake foot, you speed up, panic and mash the pedal harder speeding up more. The travel limit of the accelerator (floored) stops your foot and equates to only light braking pressure. If you don't realize the pressure on your toes is holding up the works... Morley Safer shows up at your house with a camera crew.
I loved my Audi 5000(s). I had three of them - '79, '84 Avant Wagon and '84 Sedan, and two 100 LS's; '74 and '76.. not all at once, of course - no more than two at a time.
I'm just saying that if you managed to catch the accelerator linkage, you got more accelerator than brake for the same foot travel. The linkage would actually keep your foot from applying too much brake if you really mashed down.. The conspiracy theorists would rather think the issue was much more unfathomable than something simple like that.
I used to have one of those "sudden acceleration" Audi 5000's (1979). It happened to me once and I figured out exactly what happened within five minutes. It wasn't the computer or the floor mat or anything. The accelerator pedal linkage was a solid rod which ran up a few inches from the tip of the pedal, then turned left to pass behind and above the brake pedal. If you put the arch of your foot on the brake pedal, your toes could contact the accelerator rod and depress it. Even light braking action was enough to impart enormous acceleration. The harder you stomped on the brake, the more the engine overcame the braking action. The fix was to put a metal guard plate over the rod behind the brake pedal.
It's fascinating that Microsoft publicly slaps Apple's "cool" factor in the face and yet they're desperately trying to reproduce it. Making a commodity product that stands out is enormously difficult, especially when you don't make the product. That's the only reason the Zune and the Store exists. Microsoft got tired of turd polishing commodity music players and made the Zune. They got tired of Big Box stores looking uncool and are opening their own stores. How long before they start making their own PCs and knife the PC makers? It's a matter of time.
What Microsoft should be doing is selling Windows licenses to Mac users and interoperating more with that platform. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Selling software? They shouldn't - and don't - care what hardware it's running on. Microsoft could make a $49 VM bundle out of Windows that runs as an application or could submerge the Mac OS completely. They could create one version of Office that requires their VM bundle to run on the Mac but integrates completely with the Mac and the Enterprise. All their other software would run on the Mac as well. Many people have figured out the Mac is the universal machine in this way. What Microsoft is doing now is a waste of time. They've really lost their way on who they are. Stop trying to kill everyone else and get back to selling software and interoperability.
Apple sells a lot of consumer products and the halo draws them into the stores and their computers, if for no other reason than iPod owners come into the store to pick out a belt clip and get exposed to the Mac for the first time. Microsoft sells computer related products but recognizes they have to create their own halo effect (no pun) to retain some of the computer customers leaving them. Apparently, none of their manufacturing friends can create sufficient "cool" as witnessed by the previous "Plays For Sure" disaster and the current ho-hum PC lineup. Every PC except for the Mac is a commodity. Every music player except for the iPod is a commodity. It's really killing them to see Apple flanking their core market share and they're hurting themselves by not embracing a desirable product line.
You've kind of summed it up. Each Company has a line of products and a line of marketing BS that goes along with it. It's been working well for Apple lately and Microsoft wants to reverse that trend any way they can. Consumers think this is about ease of use, choice in software, freedom with media and such. No, it's about making money. Period.
This would be a perfect time for Apple to license their OS to other PC makers who can build high quality products. The shoe would be on the other foot. The PC makers could tell Microsoft to not make PCs or they'll stop shipping Windows.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing.... pretty defensive and wondered what I said to deserve that. Maybe he's only objecting to the "Rambler" comparison and he thinks it should be closer to "Buick". I'm just saying the former Apple store people are in for a surprise.
Can't help but chuckle at the potential situations. They'll be saying "this big fat laptop that squeaks when you pick it up is a great value, especially with all those stickers on it" - and then hold the straight face for up to 10 seconds. They'll be showing game consoles to people with their hats on backwards and their pants around their knees, a big change from people who go to wine tastings and listen to NPR. They'll be selling Enterprise software to people in business suits... oh, wait... their IT staff buys that in bulk elsewhere. They'll be selling power strips with "Works with Windows" stickers on them. They'll be standing next to the Surface with a rag and bottle of Windex all day. They'll be selling Zunes to parents about to embarrass their kids - although the Zune HD looks pretty nice, so maybe not... They'll be selling WinMo phones with "what were they thinking" interfaces. Of course, there's all the most popular PC software like "Clean My Registry" and "Remove My Spyware" and "Speed Up My PC"... ok, that was a cheap shot.
Pretty smart, though. The former Apple staff can help both people switching back to Microsoft products. Stealing ideas used to be so subtle. I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft chases Apple down the street yelling "ME TOO! ME TOO!"
This is a lot like luring Lexus or Mercedes sales people to sell Ramblers. It won't take long before many realize they're selling junk yard class equipment and start sending customers back to the Apple stores.
The reason Netscape failed was because they decided they could 'own' the desktop simply by giving away their browser for free, but salting it with proprietary extensions to HTML that only their Server technology could push out. They chose to take the Web proprietary at just the time when it was growing wild and free. So while Microsoft was being forced open, Netscape was attempting to weave the web shut.
Whoa whoa whoa... Microsoft wanted the world to see a blank screen on the Internet if the entire technology chain didn't come from them. Netscape own the desktop? Do you recall the Windows desktop in the mid '90's? If Microsoft didn't make money on it, it wasn't on their desktop. If you put it on anyway, I guarantee it would be broken with the next Windows update.
Navigator was clunky and slow for sure. However, Netscape was doing more to open the web by allowing 3rd party functionality (see: Sun) which countered Microsoft's attempts to seal off the web. Microsoft introduced their famous "server extensions" which only worked on their servers doing things you could do more openly in other ways. Front Page made sure it was a closed system. Explorer became a client-server relationship which could make direct system calls to Windows which made sure every other browser didn't work right. The only reason Netscape gave their browser away is because they couldn't sell it when Microsoft was giving theirs away.
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Go use Flash somewhere else then, or don't use it. I don't really care about Flash. It means absolutely nothing to me.
Your conclusions are all wrong anyway. Microsoft was busy suing or crushing everyone to get what they wanted. The Flash exploits aren't Trojan horses - if you wait long enough, you'll get hit. Apple did do something about Flash on the desktop - they sandboxed it so it wouldn't take the browser down anymore when it predictably crashed. All you have to do is wait long enough and Flash crashes.
A meter to see how big a dent Flash puts in your battery? Brilliant. They do have a battery meter on the iDevices. If they had Flash, there would be a race between what hits first - the bottom of the battery or the end of the movie. People get 11 hours of HTML5 movie watching on an iPad. That's all the meter they need.
I say Apple good, Android potentially better except for where the overlords are suddenly taking it. They're turning that greatness into a cesspool. There are plenty of fart apps for Android too, so just get over it already.
Ok, I've got a better hold on the perspective and your frustration is certainly valid. Equally valid is the frustration of waiting for Adobe to get their act together to make their software work. Apple has a long history of being held back by Adobe's foot dragging. Why in the world would they hand over virtual control of their iPlatform (through thousands of 3rd party apps) to a company proven to be unreliable in executing on new advances? If Apple enabled a new set of API's, how long until Adobe gets around to using any portion of it so the platform appears to advance? Apple has been there, done that and burned the T-shirt with Adobe. OS X has been out for 10 years and Adobe just started using the native development environment in limited circumstances.
Apple shouldn't wait for Adobe any more than Microsoft should wait for Sony to ship new technology for the XBox.
To give an example of Adobe's sloth, OS X has had the inner workings of PDF built into the OS for the last decade. Everything you cut, copied and pasted was PDF compliant vector art on the clipboard. If you did a screen shot, it showed up as a PDF by default (it's a PNG now but that's easily changed in the command line). You could open the screen shot PDF with an Adobe product in layers. You could drag and drop vector art between dissimilar software. Anything you printed had the option of outputting PDF compliant vector files, also editable with Adobe software. I copied some cells from an Excel spreadsheet and pasted them into Illustrator and they showed up as vector art grid lines with editable text and the right font inside. I almost fell over. That was OS X at work. Basically, if Adobe were to write an OS, this would be it. Adobe could have advanced their software suites with real low level integration like they could never dream of before. Adobe didn't even care. It was impossible to achieve parity on Windows with these functions, so Adobe held back all of their software to the lowest common denominator. Because of this, you can think of Apple's reaction to Flash as payback. If it were your decision at Apple, you would decide it's irresponsible to rely on Adobe to any depth because of advances they don't take advantage of.
Well, like it or not, Apple products have only started their upward trend in the consumer [and corporate] space and Apple's choices will have a ripple effect for everything there. I don't think it's muscling the industry, it seems more like creating a [successful] ecosystem and inviting anyone to join it - or bypass it. Apple has a development environment that unfortunately doesn't include compiled Flash - or more likely in the long run, fortunately doesn't include compiled Flash. If you can name something significant that can only be accomplished with compiled Flash (other than being able to port the software around), there might be an argument. Otherwise, Apple's not going to hang their platform on a proven unreliable 3rd party.
Of course, there's Android which does allow this. Making it hard to write an app in Flash to cover both platforms will send developers like you to making a choice - and you should make the choice that suits you best. Recently, that one hope to have a competitor to the iDevices has been dramatically diluted. Google has suddenly sold out to Verizon and reversed the trend of platform providers gaining control of their systems from carriers. Everyone is going to buy their subsidized devices through carriers because it's cheaper. With it will come all the bloatware and restrictions the carriers wish to impose, even if it is Android. Verizon will bill the user for every keystroke they put into that compiled Flash app of yours and not care if they can see the output through all the ads blowing at them. As a user, I don't want that. Nobody knows how it will play out. Me and several 100 million other people are not likely to encounter anything you've written and Flash is potentially the Netscape Navigator of this decade. Or not.
Now, if Apple bought Adobe, which they easily could, all of this could change. Who knows what Windows Mobile 7 or whatever it's called will bring, but that's still a few years off.
Cheers and best of luck to you.
Apparently, "every tactic Microsoft ever used" is not really the strong part of your perspective, nor is the understanding of what a monopolist is. Microsoft would "partner" with countless technology companies hopeful of riding on Microsoft's coattails into wild profits. What they quickly discovered is Microsoft taking their technologies, modifying them a little to be "Windows Only" and re-releasing it en masse. This made the original technology irrelevant, the original file formats incompatible with anything else and the original company usually perished. That's what monopoly power did for Microsoft. They could dictate terms of nearly anything to any company under threat of getting squashed by destroying their ability to interoperate.
This is very different. Apple is protective of their own platform but they're doing nothing to damage Flash or the Internet. If they were Microsoftish about it, they would "partner" with Adobe, get them to rework Flash to only work on Macs and the iDevices and re-release it so everyone else would see a blank screen on the Internet. Same with WebKit - following the Microsoft model, they would poison WebKit to only work with Apple products, give away free matching server software and web dev tools to everyone in order to make the Internet say "You must use Safari to view this web site". That's not happening with Apple but that's exactly what Microsoft did with IE.
What Apple is doing is rejecting this kind of behavior on its own platform and taking their chances. It would be one thing to suddenly dump compatible Flash and seamlessly replace it with their own Flash-like technology once the iPhone gained enough market share. That would be the Microsoft method like they did with Java. Instead, Apple rejected Flash right from the start when the iPhone and the iPad had exactly zero market share. Despite that, these products are huge sellers anyway.
There's a message in there - many millions of people are perfectly happy without Flash. The iPhone has the highest satisfaction rating of all mobile devices. Approved apps sounds good to me if it does what I want, doesn't crash my phone, eat my battery or steal my data. If Google wants to allow all that, more power to them. However, Apple, at their own peril, is hoping that developers will also reject the proprietary Internet in favor of more open technologies available to everyone. This is bad for Adobe and Flash but there are a few ways to escape this problem for Adobe; start making viable HTML5 development tools or get Flash to actually work without smoking your battery and release it as an open source product. Apple would probably warm up to that.
Adobe already makes other proprietary software like Photoshop, but the files it saves are easily decoded and capable of exchange with competing products. That's how it should work. It doesn't matter that the software itself is proprietary as long as it interoperates with standardized file formats or on the Internet. That's what a healthy development environment should strive for, not some proprietary digital glop like Flash.
If you're upset about anything, it's what Google and Verizon are cooking up for that "open" platform called Android. They took a potentially great system like that and immediately locked it down against anyone actually using it like Linux. It's looking open for the carriers to shove whatever they want into Android but not for the users to do anything about it. Get ready for the Google advertising fire hose to invade your Droid and for Verizon to figure out how to sell your own pictures back to you. The crap over Flash on the iPhone is nothing compared to that.
The intentions are likely different from what you're thinking. I don't believe anyone really sets out to become a monopolist and Jobs is no exception. He appears to be removing the things which have treated his platform badly and is replacing them with two things - standards based technologies and platform specific technologies. You can use either. Calling Flash a healthy development environment is a laugh since it has become one of the most resource hungry attack vectors of recent memory. If Apple made huge profits off their App Store, I could see why they'd want to protect it from end runs. It appears the revenue from the App Store Is healthy but is a drop in the bucket compared to the profit from selling products that don't confound the end user... Or kill their batteries in an hour... or don't work well with touch devices anyway. If Flash didn't have the long list of failings, I think it would be on the iDevices. The fact that it isn't in its current state is a favor to the end user.
Everything people complain about and point at for being monopolistic from Apple has an escape hatch for the end user. Apple has every right to monopolize their own offerings and is under no obligation to support things which harm their offerings. That said, Apple is far from a monopoly.
The iPod is first and foremost an MP3 player. Purchases from iTunes with DRM may be recorded to CD and used anywhere else. The Mac has some proprietary pieces but I can compile and run damn near anything on it.
The Walled Garden complaints are understandable but interesting in that none of my exploit laden PC viruses will run on my Macs or iDevices but cause the IT department at work to lock down my network and computers nearly to the point of being non-functional. Ironically, I feel like I have more freedom inside that walled garden because of that.
That's kind of the point. Some people like to work on things all the time and some people just like things that work. Getting back to agreeable standards can only help things work better.
@DavidApi "The web (Internet) was supposed to provide a platform *snip* And that means HTML. Not Flash, or Silverlight, or even Java Applets."
You're my fscking hero! Why cater to 80% of the customers with proprietary things when you can cater to 100% of the customers with standards based things? That leaves out Flash, Silverlight (gag), and [sadly] even Java Applets. Die Flash, Die!... and Silverlight too (the last gasp of Windows Media).
The proprietary part of this whole argument is Flash and the geeks are moaning about it not being supported? Holy crap, Batman! Almost nothing good has ever come through Flash on my browsers.
"thats' really an indication of your skill, not the platform"
I'd have to side with @jythie on this one.
I came from a video post production house heavy with Mac workstations and now work at a major network channel that's very Windosey. My god - I truly can't understand the world's sad devotion to Windows. I hardly ever heard from the 60 Mac users at my last job and now I spend most of my day keeping a few dozen HP 360 and 380 shitboxes connected, booted and trying to finish the work you ask them to do. There's always something falling apart on these systems and they're slow as ass.
There's also a Mac graphics department with 12 machines. I MIGHT spend an hour a MONTH maintaining ALL of them put together.
My two year old 8-core Mac Pro at home can run rings around the 12-core HP 380 G6 server at work. On top of that, the people here THINK THAT'S HOW COMPUTERS ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK and keep buying them. Cripes.
On top of that, I'm sure I only spent half the money on all the Mac servers and workstations as they spent on this stuff.
There's something to this OS X thing. I wouldn't write it off so fast.
Meanwhile the "experts" at the Apple store tell customers that their machines "can't get viruses because they're built different". Seriously - this was overheard at one of their stores and it's mind boggling.
You know the difference between a virus and a trojan, no?
Sorry to burst your bubble, AC, but it's a fact that probably 100 people at the company I work for have changed to Macs at home in the last four years. Their first exposure was here. One came in and said "Macs? Why are you using Macs? Why do they even exist?" Within a year, he bought a MacBook Pro and now freelances using an 8-core Mac Pro (audio mixer). About half of the rest were combative Windows users (as opposed to open minded Windows users). That doesn't count about 25% of new people who already owned Macs.
New Mac users usually fail because they try using Windows chops on the Mac.
"Where's the damn My Documents folder?"
- "Well, there's a Documents folder, so lets rename it to My Documents. Is that better?"
"So, what do I do with THAT now?"
- "You could try dragging your documents into it."
They get over it pretty quickly. Most of them have drop kicked their home PC and bought Macs.
I'm not sure what you mean by "made its way through quicktime" but if you're trying to imply that quicktime is used at any level in professional film, video or music production you are wrong.
I'd dare say you know nothing about professional film, video or music. You'll need to account for the fact that nearly half of the media you see every day is run through Final Cut Pro, a nice front end for editing XML files which manipulate QuickTime movies... on a Mac. There is no Windows version, there is no Linux version. Less than a quarter of professional media is done on Avids. That's not to say Avid doesn't have a strong presence in the market, it means the market has gotten gigantic in the last decade (mostly due to Final Cut) and the Avid share has been dwarfed in place. There are a few other systems of course, like Quantel, but they're insignificant when compared to the power of The Force.
Windows software on my Mac Pro (8-core 3.2Ghz Xeon) under Parallels is faster than running natively on PC hardware, namely an HP x8600 8-core 3.16Ghz Xeon (I think I've got the speed right) owned by a friend. Rendering an hour of MPEG2 video using the same software (CineVision) takes over 2 hours on his PC and just north of an hour on my Mac.
One thing I've done is put my virtual machine drives on a fast RAID (8x Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives + RocketRAID 2322). That array pushes over 600MB/sec. Windows XP boots in about 20 seconds (the native PC takes over a minute). Now, my friend is buying Macs to run Windows. He gets more done and doesn't struggle with trying to put host adapters in the PC which never seem to work (eSATA cards, video cards, Firewire cards etc). Parallels sees all the required hardware right through the host system (the dongles, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT required by Scenarist under the PC, the RocketRAID card etc).
I beat a speeding ticket in New Shrewsbury N.J. (back in the Nixon administration) by going to the police station and requesting to see their FCC license to operate the radar. After an hour of three people tossing filing cabinets, getting more and more worried that they actually didn't have one, they found it. The license had expired two months before and I suggested they reverse all the speeding tickets they had issued during the expiration period. They sincerely thanked me for that exercise.
Everyone should spend a week driving the Autobahn. If you're not actively passing someone, you had better be in the right lane. If you're in the left lane, as most Americans believe is their entitlement, you're likely to get plowed by (in this order) a Mercedes, an Audi and a Volkswagen. Keep right except to pass, please.
I don't care what their names are. What are they doing out of prison?
Yes, that's what the "driver error" camp had come up with as one likely fix for the cause. I don't know about that one. Forty years after the introduction of the Hydra-Matic transmission, suddenly people are confused about when to step on the gas and shift into drive? A silent modification on the post "60 Minutes" Audis was to put a steel plate as a guard over the accelerator linkage rod behind the brake pedal. Having owned a pile of Audis through that era, I'd have to say my later ones with the steel plate prevented accidental contact with the accelerator link. It was an incredibly dumb design to start with. Might as well put the power window and ejection seat buttons next to each other.
Oh, yeah... if you stand on the brakes, the engine isn't pushing you anywhere. If you're driving along and catch that accelerator linkage with your brake foot, you speed up, panic and mash the pedal harder speeding up more. The travel limit of the accelerator (floored) stops your foot and equates to only light braking pressure. If you don't realize the pressure on your toes is holding up the works... Morley Safer shows up at your house with a camera crew.
I loved my Audi 5000(s). I had three of them - '79, '84 Avant Wagon and '84 Sedan, and two 100 LS's; '74 and '76.. not all at once, of course - no more than two at a time.
I'm just saying that if you managed to catch the accelerator linkage, you got more accelerator than brake for the same foot travel. The linkage would actually keep your foot from applying too much brake if you really mashed down.. The conspiracy theorists would rather think the issue was much more unfathomable than something simple like that.
I used to have one of those "sudden acceleration" Audi 5000's (1979). It happened to me once and I figured out exactly what happened within five minutes. It wasn't the computer or the floor mat or anything. The accelerator pedal linkage was a solid rod which ran up a few inches from the tip of the pedal, then turned left to pass behind and above the brake pedal. If you put the arch of your foot on the brake pedal, your toes could contact the accelerator rod and depress it. Even light braking action was enough to impart enormous acceleration. The harder you stomped on the brake, the more the engine overcame the braking action. The fix was to put a metal guard plate over the rod behind the brake pedal.
It's fascinating that Microsoft publicly slaps Apple's "cool" factor in the face and yet they're desperately trying to reproduce it. Making a commodity product that stands out is enormously difficult, especially when you don't make the product. That's the only reason the Zune and the Store exists. Microsoft got tired of turd polishing commodity music players and made the Zune. They got tired of Big Box stores looking uncool and are opening their own stores. How long before they start making their own PCs and knife the PC makers? It's a matter of time.
What Microsoft should be doing is selling Windows licenses to Mac users and interoperating more with that platform. Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing? Selling software? They shouldn't - and don't - care what hardware it's running on. Microsoft could make a $49 VM bundle out of Windows that runs as an application or could submerge the Mac OS completely. They could create one version of Office that requires their VM bundle to run on the Mac but integrates completely with the Mac and the Enterprise. All their other software would run on the Mac as well. Many people have figured out the Mac is the universal machine in this way. What Microsoft is doing now is a waste of time. They've really lost their way on who they are. Stop trying to kill everyone else and get back to selling software and interoperability.
Apple sells a lot of consumer products and the halo draws them into the stores and their computers, if for no other reason than iPod owners come into the store to pick out a belt clip and get exposed to the Mac for the first time. Microsoft sells computer related products but recognizes they have to create their own halo effect (no pun) to retain some of the computer customers leaving them. Apparently, none of their manufacturing friends can create sufficient "cool" as witnessed by the previous "Plays For Sure" disaster and the current ho-hum PC lineup. Every PC except for the Mac is a commodity. Every music player except for the iPod is a commodity. It's really killing them to see Apple flanking their core market share and they're hurting themselves by not embracing a desirable product line.
You've kind of summed it up. Each Company has a line of products and a line of marketing BS that goes along with it. It's been working well for Apple lately and Microsoft wants to reverse that trend any way they can. Consumers think this is about ease of use, choice in software, freedom with media and such. No, it's about making money. Period.
This would be a perfect time for Apple to license their OS to other PC makers who can build high quality products. The shoe would be on the other foot. The PC makers could tell Microsoft to not make PCs or they'll stop shipping Windows.
I'd pick a Rambler over a Lexus or Mercedes, any day.
Ramblers were great cars back in the day. Parts were cheap and easy to find - the junkyards were full of them.
Thank you. I was thinking the same thing.... pretty defensive and wondered what I said to deserve that. Maybe he's only objecting to the "Rambler" comparison and he thinks it should be closer to "Buick". I'm just saying the former Apple store people are in for a surprise.
Can't help but chuckle at the potential situations. They'll be saying "this big fat laptop that squeaks when you pick it up is a great value, especially with all those stickers on it" - and then hold the straight face for up to 10 seconds. They'll be showing game consoles to people with their hats on backwards and their pants around their knees, a big change from people who go to wine tastings and listen to NPR. They'll be selling Enterprise software to people in business suits... oh, wait... their IT staff buys that in bulk elsewhere. They'll be selling power strips with "Works with Windows" stickers on them. They'll be standing next to the Surface with a rag and bottle of Windex all day. They'll be selling Zunes to parents about to embarrass their kids - although the Zune HD looks pretty nice, so maybe not... They'll be selling WinMo phones with "what were they thinking" interfaces. Of course, there's all the most popular PC software like "Clean My Registry" and "Remove My Spyware" and "Speed Up My PC"... ok, that was a cheap shot.
Pretty smart, though. The former Apple staff can help both people switching back to Microsoft products. Stealing ideas used to be so subtle. I never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft chases Apple down the street yelling "ME TOO! ME TOO!"
This is a lot like luring Lexus or Mercedes sales people to sell Ramblers. It won't take long before many realize they're selling junk yard class equipment and start sending customers back to the Apple stores.
They'll find large quantities of hydrazane and oxygen in what gets tossed up... and aluminum.
The reason Netscape failed was because they decided they could 'own' the desktop simply by giving away their browser for free, but salting it with proprietary extensions to HTML that only their Server technology could push out. They chose to take the Web proprietary at just the time when it was growing wild and free. So while Microsoft was being forced open, Netscape was attempting to weave the web shut.
Whoa whoa whoa... Microsoft wanted the world to see a blank screen on the Internet if the entire technology chain didn't come from them. Netscape own the desktop? Do you recall the Windows desktop in the mid '90's? If Microsoft didn't make money on it, it wasn't on their desktop. If you put it on anyway, I guarantee it would be broken with the next Windows update.
Navigator was clunky and slow for sure. However, Netscape was doing more to open the web by allowing 3rd party functionality (see: Sun) which countered Microsoft's attempts to seal off the web. Microsoft introduced their famous "server extensions" which only worked on their servers doing things you could do more openly in other ways. Front Page made sure it was a closed system. Explorer became a client-server relationship which could make direct system calls to Windows which made sure every other browser didn't work right. The only reason Netscape gave their browser away is because they couldn't sell it when Microsoft was giving theirs away.
This patent is for Microsoft to sue anyone who opens their proprietary digital glop with something other than Word without a license.