Is Apple's Attack On Flash Really About Video? 595
jamiegau writes "Here we have a long and in-depth blog post analyzing the faults in Steve Jobs's Letter about Flash. The writer concludes with an interesting idea that it is all about online video."
Re:Games too (Score:5, Interesting)
Not sure why you got modded down...games are a huge part of why Apple won't allow it. Places like Newgrounds, Kongregate, etc...they would be filled with games that worked on the iPad and iPhone, yet would be free...meaning Apple wouldn't get their cut.
They don't want you gardening outside of their walls, especially if the plants are "given" to you for nothing. They can claim security and stability (which are valid points), but it all comes down to money.
No it's not (Score:4, Interesting)
It's all about keep selling high markup iDevices. To achieve that they need to make sure to have a lock-in. Lock in is achieved by making sure developers only code for your platform. Ballmer's "Developers! Developers! Developers!" might have been funny, but that is exactly what Apple is aiming for. Video lock-in won't work because it's H.264 and other big players can/will just as well sell H.264 format videos.
When 40% or so your profit comes from iDevices, and a fraction of that from AppStore and/or iTunes, you want to protect your iDevice markup. If Apple allows cross compilers, guess what? People won't be 'loyal' to Apple and will migrate to Android, BB or WM7 devices because their apps are on those platforms as well. The iPhone becomes a commodity, and Apple's profits crater. It's about software lock-in and not about content lock in.
Oh, Jamie, oh Jamie (Score:5, Interesting)
Either a strange coincidence or an badly disguised case of self-promotion:
jamiegau writes:"Here we have ... The writer concludes ..."
and the blog's name is "JamieG Analysis".
If you submit your own article why not say it?
Re:Games too (Score:3, Interesting)
This argument makes no sense to me. HTML5 can already replicate pretty much anything these Flash games do and is also outside of Apple's control. Are you suggesting that Apple somehow doesn't realize this?
You should really take some time to look over what's currently possible with HTML5. Quake2 has been ported as a proof of concept, and the first level or so of Out Of This World.
http://web.appstorm.net/roundups/browsers/10-html5-games-paving-the-way/ [appstorm.net]
Re:Games too (Score:2, Interesting)
Hardly. In order for a company to stay in business, they have to make enough profit to invest back into their business to create new products. I mean, look at all the stuff Apple has done that is new and innovative, particularly in the last five years. It takes a lot of money to do that, particularly since for every successful concept that you sink billions into developing, there are dozens of other concepts that you also sink money into but that fail. For a business, unless you are providing a commodity, a small profit margin may as well be a loss.
I can buy a lot of arguments about what Apple is doing being bad for consumers, though consumers don't seem to mind. I can buy a lot of arguments about what Apple is doing being bad for developers, though developers still seem to be developing for the platform. But I don't see the meagre profits from the app store, or from video rentals, or similar low-margin operations (possibly, in fact probably, including their music sales) as being reasonable; they strike me as ignorant of how businesses think. Yes, it's all about money with Apple (and every other successful corporation), but for Apple, the money is in the device sales.
Let me expand that a bit. Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on. If Apple could sell enough more music players to pay for the costs of hosting the songs just by giving away the songs, they would probably do it. The problem is that if the songs are all free, then Apple's costs go up (both hosting/bandwidth costs and the costs of royalties to the music companies) astronomically, so it's probably not possible to make more profit on music players from giving away music than from selling it at a nominal cost. If Apple could make more money giving away videos than selling them, they probably would for the same reason. And so on.
So why does Apple so tightly control the app store? Why is it that they want to ensure that apps are not crashing, or even worse crashing the device? Why is it that they want to ensure that applications are not poor performers, or that they don't drain the battery of the device? Why were they so long in allowing multi-tasking, and even then only allowing it in very restricted contexts? Quite simply, if apps for the platform were to do these things, then the ordinary, unsophisticated user would blame the platform rather than the software vendor for the crashes and performance problems they experience. This already happens on PCs: Microsoft gets blamed for badly written third party device drivers, poor third party software and the like. And if users start seeing the platform as poorly performing and underpowered and crash-prone, Apple would sell fewer of those devices and would make less money.
And honestly, this has been borne out by many platforms. Quick, name successful tablets with high volume sales. As far as I can tell, that's just Apple. Quick, name successful smart phone vendors with high volume sales. Discounting Microsoft (though this may change with Windows Phone 7), Nokia, and Palm, all of which are flailing about and unable to adapt to the current market, there are basically Apple and RIM (which both tightly control their platforms) and Google (which doesn't). But note that Apple and RIM are hardware vendors, and Google is a software vendor: they have different priorities. We will see which philosophy is preferred by users, but my long-term bet is that Apple and RIM will survive, and any other smart phone vendors will be basically niche market vendors at best.
So I can't really blame Apple for a lot of the decisions they've made, even the ones I disagree with. They are just trying to represent the interests of their shareholders by making a profit, which is their job after all.
Re:God save flash! (Score:2, Interesting)
Before Apple sunk their teeth into flash, a lot of the posters here also bashed it.
Yeah, and I think everyone agrees that Flash is a bloated piece of crap and that it would be great if we could replace it with HTML 5.
But that's not why people are complaining about Apple's dickhead move. I can accept them deciding not adding Flash support to Mobile Safari.
But what I won't accept is:
1. Them disallowing a competing browser to be written for their phone that DOES support Flash.
2. Them disallowing Adobe to write a plugin for Mobile Safari to add Flash support.
3. Them disallowing ANYONE from using Flash as the basis for a mobile app on the iPhone.
So, I don't like Flash. But Adobe isn't being the anti-competitive dicks here. Apple is. Adobe wrote a technology that allows a Flash app to be translated to an iPhone app. People who use that will still have to fork up money for the iPhone developer's license and Apple will still get their percentage of sales on the App Store, so why the fuck would they ban that?!
Simple: they're anti-competitive dicks.
Re:It's not all about video (Score:4, Interesting)
Adobe's Flash player causes Firefox on Linux to regularly lock up. In fact, playing video from pretty much anywhere but Youtube and Vimeo seems to do it. I installed the flashblock extension, so all flash comes up as a blank box and I can click on it if I really want to see what it is. But I cringe every time, because more often than not, my browser is going to lock up either while that flash object is doing whatever it does, or shortly after.
It's pretty clear Adobe only invests serious effort in quality for Windows. People who only experience Flash on Windows just don't have any idea how horribly buggy it is on other platforms.
Re:Games too (Score:2, Interesting)
I think part of the problem is that Adobe *still* treats Apple like a second class platform. Flash stinks on OSX. It crashes *constantly*. Adobe's CS is a slow bloated behemoth that never bothered (until CS5) to use Apple's native OSX APIs (Cocoa) but instead stuck with their old legacy/compatibility APIs (Carbon). Even when Adobe finally started working on improving Flash, they tried to blame the whole thing on Apple.
I think you're right to point out that there seems to be bad blood between these companies, but I think it's because of ongoing fights between the companies.
Re:Games too (Score:2, Interesting)
Adobe still treats Apple like a second class citizen.
The Flash Player is ass on a good day.
None of the Adobe products other than Flash Player will install on a Mac with a case sensitive partition.
Adobe took freaking FOR EVER to update their Apps to the new API (Cocoa, and I'm not sure its actually done in CS5 or not, I'll never know since it requires a case insensitive filesystem!)
In short, even if Apple was doing nothing more than trying to hurt Adobe, I'd still be on Apple's side. Adobe has been more of a pain in the ass to me in the last 5 years than MS ever was.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is the opinion of a Flash dev. (Score:3, Interesting)
Stop swimming in the bullshit.
How many websites have closed their doors in preference to an iPhone application?
Unless the iPhone becomes the primary device that most people use to access information on the internet there is really no risk of that ever happening. Meanwhile trying to use the web without Flash is pretty hit or miss.
Re:video (Score:5, Interesting)
Steve didn't mention it because its bullshit.
I've had HW accelerated video for ... 5 ... 6 years ... I donno, whenever I started writing that particular app.
There were NEW APIs introduced recently to make it so even the Geico cavemen could figure out how to do it, but anyone who hasn't been capable of playing h264 video in a hardware accelerated window in the last 5 years should not be called a developer. Hell, there are freaking xcode examples on Apples website dated 4 years ago.
Like I said ... been playing hardware accelerated video on my mac for years in my own apps.
Re:Games too (Score:5, Interesting)
WinAmp - OK, where do you get those mp3's from - you know you can use those with iTunes too, so you wouldn't be locked-in if you used iTunes. Even if you used the iTunes store, that's now DRM-free for music. For movie downloads that might be a problem, but I'm not aware of any source of DRM-free mainstream movie rental or purchase so no disadvantage with Apple here.
iPod - OK, you're semi-right with that, although there are third-party utilities to sync the iPod, if you're keen to be completely hassle and lock-in free then the iPod probably isn't the best choice.
BlackBerry - OK, right, so RIM will freely provide you with equivalent apps for the Android or iPhone if you decide to jump ship? Thought not.
iMac / Mac Desktop - OK, you know you can install Ubuntu and/or XP if you want to. Again - I'm sure Dell or Microsoft won't supply you with equivalents of the commercial apps that you've bought if you choose to switch to another platform, so you're no worse with Dell/XP than you are with iMac/OSX. If you want FOSS then most popular packages are available for Windows, Linux and OSX so no disadvantage there.
So pretty much, the only valid argument you make is to steer clear of the iPod, but only on the basis that you might not want to use iTunes, but since you can use iTunes in a non-lockin manner for music that's not really a firm argument either. So I can't really understand why you would be more locked-in using Apple products compared to Microsoft, RIM and Canonical. I really would like to understand - can you explain?
Re:video (Score:3, Interesting)
I had a GPGPU example running on a web page in Safari (for giggles) about four years ago. If you can get full GPGPU access through a web page writing a little video decoder shouldn't be a big deal.
Re:Games too (Score:3, Interesting)