
Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight - ashish_0x90
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/adobe-ad-apple/
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raganwald
The crux argument is surprisingly cogent: Adobe needs to make a killer
product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion, the one
mechanism that has never been shown to work in the past.

I think there's a huge amount of opportunity for Adobe here. Application
development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for
something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't
even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever.

Pushing Flash because it's a dominant player in a legacy market is a little
like going back to 1995 and arguing that people ought to be able to make web
servers in PowerBuilder because that's the language everyone is using for
business applications.

Adobe doesn't call me up and tell me how to write software, so I'm loathe to
tell them what to do. I'll just say that it would be incredibly cool if they
went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary
product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices.

~~~
alec
"Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the
popular opinion."

They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with
them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a
number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and
Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last
long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell,
there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.

~~~
gaius
But then how's there a YouTube player on the iPad? Something doesn't add up.

~~~
ori_b
Youtube has supported flash-free streams to mobile devices for a long time -
long before the iphone came out, even. (I remember seeing this back when I was
starting an internship at RIM, several years back)

~~~
gaius
OK, so Flash _isn't_ necessary to access YouTube, and that is one of Flash
supporter's main arguments.

Not sure making that point deserves a -4.

~~~
Jun8
Tell me about it :-) I guess there are some people who are very sensitive
about this issue.

Fact of the matter is: Flash _was_ necessary to access YouTube before Apple
demanded the H.264 transcoding.

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Alex63
Can't help pointing out that shortly after Sean Connery's character derides
Capone's men for "bringing a knife to a gunfight", they shoot him down in an
alleyway into which he has chased them. Not that I expect anything similar in
this particular case.

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acg
With all this talk of flash you would be lead to believe that Adobe are the
worst company in the world. I just isn't, they have some really good products
that nobody in the industry has managed to copy yet. Let's face it, the reason
for Apple's attitude is Adobe is a serious player with the resources that
could change the nature of Apple's mobile computing platform and reduce mac
sales (developers really have to buy a Mac to write apps).

I'm not for flash, but some of the authoring tools available from Adobe are
difficult to copy. I'm thinking how would I do some of that key frame
animation that's been in flash for years in html5? Tweening?

Is this another case where the competition is fended off for just enough time
to build the software in-house or buy it in?

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rmason
This guy from the headline forward doesn't get it. Adobe may not have had a
hand in starting the DOJ or FTC investigations of Apple's new developer
contract but they are determined to get in front of the parade to see them
prosecuted.

This campaign is all about shaping public opinion and if they succeed Apple
will pull down their artifical wall.

IMHO that's what this whole campaign is all about. Back fifteen years ago when
Microsoft was playing a variation of this game by not giving equal access for
outsiders to all their api you guys sided against Microsoft.

Now that it's Apple doing it why are you using Microsoft's old argument that
the complainer needs to just go back and innovate? In case you haven't noticed
Adobe is doing plenty of amazing things.

~~~
maukdaddy
_sigh_

Outside of HN and the tech community, the general public doesn't give a SHIT
about this kind of argument. Adobe can try to shape public opinion all day
long, and it won't matter in the end. The only way they can survive is
creating innovative products. Lately, they seem completely incapable of doing
that.

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jbrun
I must say that this is pretty damn accurate. Not much else to add.

~~~
bballant
It is probably out of scope for the article, or maybe too much on the opinion
side, but the Flash developer experience is pretty horrendous.

There are too many ways to mix UI created code, time-line/movie clip stuff,
and actual ActionScript code. It can make for some nightmare projects. At
least this was the case a couple of years ago when I unconditionally stopped
working in Flash.

XCode is not perfect by any means, but way better than flash. It finds the
right balance between interface building in a GUI and straight-up coding.
Objective-C can be weird, but less weird than ActionScript. Oh, and XCode is
free.

So, regardless of the business side, or even the end user experience side, I
(and I think most developers) would choose XCode and Objective-C over Flash
and ActionScript.

~~~
JBiserkov
XCode is free just like IE is free: a free add-on on overpriced product.

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FreeRadical
I thinnk it's meant to say 'We heart Apple', not love.

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ergo98
This latest ad campaign was poorly conceived. Adobe's prior response -- which
was essentially "Ah well...fuck you Jobs. We'll be over there on Android and
Blackberry and WebOS" was brilliant. It left it on the perfect note.

Now they've again gone back to pandering for sympathy. It's lame.

Nonetheless, this article is stupid. The author is hopping on the dogpile and
saying all of the classic "talking points", hoping to pander to the audience
with the right amount of fluffing.

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baconsaltRocks
Wasnt the campaign supposed to mean Adobe loves apple but not Apple® ?

