iPad/iPhone/iPod (iPOS) as Open Platform… Why Bother?
A friend asked me on Twitter this morning:
Why is flash such a contentious issue for Apple? licensing? processing overhead? them wanting to own everything?
Really it all boils down to this: the iPOS is Apple’s end-to-end platform from the processor to the hardware to the operating system, media and communication software, all the way up to the point of sale for music, video, books, and applications to the end users. All of it 100% Apple.
So why bother?
Why bother with partners, contracts, meetings, negotiations, testing, failures, support, and other BS? Why deal with any of that if you don’t have to. Instead, each part of the iPOS is deliberately optimized to work with the others without fail or debate. Apple pwns the chip, the device, the OS… Totally vertical.
Despite isolation, the iPOS platform has been wildly successful. Despite every nasty trick Apple pulls, from the 50% early-adopter tax on the first iPhone to forging Flash content in their promotional material and outright lying about “the entire internet on your device”, they’re kicking ass and we’re eating it up.
We’re buying their toys… along with overpriced specialized connectors and adapters (a tethered wireless-device???)
We’re creating and installing their apps… per approval and 30% cut.
We spread their rumors; We make-up their news.
We create and follow live-blogs and live pirate cell-phone video streams whenever Jobs speaks.
So seriously, from their perspective:
Why no Flash? Why no open platform? Really??? It already works, that’s why.
Why bother?
February 2nd, 2010 at 2:20 am
Adobe are notoriously bad at maintaining and upgrading their software. They do new features and new versions, but they don’t do updates, fixes and improvements. Certainly, just improving something as arbitrary as *performance* would be completely out of the question.
Adobe Flash has sucked major balls since forever. They do not improve the performance of it, seemingly at all. To this day, Flash is the biggest performance hog in existence on OS X and on Linux (while also being the most crash prone software available for OS X). I don’t think Apple thinks very highly of Adobe. Would you blame them?
Certainly, Apple likes to be in control. But it’s not like they don’t do partnerships. Apple does demand the very highest level of quality though, which is incompatible with Adobe’s method of fire-and-forget. I’m sure Steve is furious with the state of mobile network operators in the US, too.
Adobe cannot be bothered to deliver a performant Flash plugin for regular OS X or Linux boxes, what makes you think they could do it for a device with just a fraction of the power? And I’m not talking about just video playback here, Flash demands boat loads of performance for the simplest kinds of animation and graphic display.
Adobe software simply sucks balls. They don’t maintain it, they don’t fix it. They seemingly don’t give a shit about software that has already been shipped. Like you mentioned, Apple just barely needs Adobe’s crappy software on their mobile platform, so why bother? It’s not just about control though, it’s about quality.