

Newly-Hired Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch Is a Bozo, a Bad Hire - danilocampos
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/03/19/lynch-bozo

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andrewljohnson
Kind of like calling the defense attorney for a guilty client a bozo. What is
the CTO of Adobe going to say?

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quesera
Except that in this analogy, Lynch wasn't the defense attorney, he was the
defendant, and he was committing the crime in front of the judge, jury, and
prosecution.

But the analogy is weak. He was the CTO, not the PR dept. he made the
decisions he was defending. He was wrong. That's an important thing to watch
out for in a CTO.

On the plus side, Bob Mansfield suffers no fools. Lynch will be awesome, or
disappear.

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lopatin
Deeper issues? I respect John and his blog a lot, but this post is a bit of
bologna. Kevin Lynch had faith in his product and was defending it when under
scrutiny, just as the Adobe CTO should. It wasn't even that obvious that Flash
would turn out to be a failure on mobile, but hindsight is 20/20 for Gruber
and I guess he thinks it entitles him to personally judge a person based on
one failure. It's almost as if he himself has never failed.

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TheMagicHorsey
What do you expect someone from Adobe to say about Flash? That may not have
been the way he felt himself. He might have had to toe the company line.

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Thing_Two
applying hindsight retroactively and prognosticating on that basis seems like
a bozo kind of idea...

(post takes a single piece of Kevin's writing about Flash, from a then-Adobe
staffer, from a few years back, and extrapolates - move along, nothing
interesting here)

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Samuel_Michon
Three years a go most people recognized Flash for what it is. The only
platform on which Flash works well is desktop Windows, and even there it's a
CPU hog with serious security vulnerabilities. By 2010, Gruber had been
writing about Flash' many faults for years – this was 3 years after the
introduction of the iPhone. Lynch must've known Flash was a sick puppy, he
just couldn't bring himself to euthanize it.

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Samuel_Michon
Presumably, Apple didn't hire Kevin Lynch to bring the wonders of Flash to
iOS, so his PR speak on the topic isn't terribly relevant. If anything, it
shows he was loyal to his employer, defending and promoting a technology that
he knew smelled like poop. That's a trait Apple looks for in its job
applicants as well.

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jack-r-abbit
I would much rather have companies responsible for non-Apple products to keep
going with their vision than to just roll over and give up just because Apple
said it was dead. As if Apple can never be wrong. Fuck that. Keep doing what
you're doing... and quit giving Apple so much power.

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brudgers
In _Ancestor's Tale_ [highly recommended] Richard Dawkins describes the
incredible sensory organ that is the Duck Billed Platypus's bill as a marvel
of evolution. He points out that "being primitive is not a full time way of
life."

Likewise, neither is being wrong.

Most predictions are just shoveling the present into the future and often they
look silly after a few years.

<http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/08/12/microsoft-nokia>

Gruber is just being a bully.

~~~
r00fus
Your example cite doesn't help your case. Nokia shares have been in the toilet
since the Microsoft debacle. As soon as former MSFT VP Elop made a big move at
Nokia (the burning platform speech), the stock dropped 20% in a week, and
continued down ever since.

More than anything Gruber was pretty much right. How different (read: better)
is Nokia's position compared to Yahoo?

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freework
Isn't it kind of unprofessional to publicly call people out like that? Its one
thing to criticize, but this is name calling.

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taligent
Firstly he is not a bozo because he made that statement. He is a bozo for
releasing slow, buggy, insecure Flash versions. Apple had every reason not to
want it on their phone given the statistics they get from CrashReporter.

Secondly Bob Mansfield is one tough, demanding, ridiculously smart guy who has
a long history of delivering. The fact that Kevin Lynch is reporting to him
says it all. He is very much on probation and will have his ass handed to him
super quickly if he doesn't live up to expectations.

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drivebyacct2
To be fair, a lot of people thought Flash was going to be better on Android
than it turned out to be. I still don't know how they managed to make it so
bad. The input model was bad. The performance was awful. There were security
issues that affected the Android version as well IIRC. Lots of people were
wrong about lots of technology three years ago.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
It wasn't bad. I used to watch Conan episodes all the time on the Nexus One,
something I wouldn't have been able to do had it not been for flash. There was
also the Kongregate games which worked well.

Most flash content wasn't made for touch, so in that respect it was imperfect
but judging it for what it was, it was fine. There's a lot of hindsight going
on painting flash on mobile to being much worse than it really was. The
reality is that flash on mobile failed because it wasn't on the iPhone and no
matter how great it might have been elsewhere it would have still failed
because it wasn't on the iPhone.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Maybe we had different expectations. I was an early Android (Droid OG) adopter
and admittedly was one of the people that thought Flash on Android would be
useful. Maybe it was simply my perception of it being useless since HTML5 was
already making a splash for mobile video (similar to the point you make), but
outside of using on vacation to stream a video from Subsonic, I found it to be
pretty slow to the point of being annoying to use (the same way most people
perceived Android pre-GB/ICS/JB). By time I got a phone like the Galaxy Nexus
that could probably power it seamlessly, there just wasn't any use for it any
more.

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MatthewPhillips
I think the performance varied from device-to-device and from site-to-site.
The heavier uses tended to perform worse, the flash games designed for mobile
tended to perform much better.

But it's really moot, flash on mobile didn't fail because of quality, it
failed because it wasn't on the iPhone. A cross-platform runtime that's not
cross-platform is pretty worthless, no matter the quality of it.

