
Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife - mascarenhas
http://www.osnews.com/story/23224/Jobs_on_Flash_Hypocrisy_So_Thick_You_Could_Cut_it_with_a_Knife
======
pohl
I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that
people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand
when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't.

The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't
use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-
denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform.

That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft
forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for
Microsoft to do so.

But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform
product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.

~~~
andreyf
I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try
to explain it.

There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source
is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary
formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source
implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to
that audience.

But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is _always_ better than closed:
for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video
formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit.
To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and
without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you
support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about
end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just
common sense.

Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure
morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point
of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan
of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to
pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent
that shareholder interests align with open-source morality.

A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored
opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and
storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also
important to remember, however, that the _reason_ On2 was able to get
investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections
they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee
such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and
investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.

~~~
binspace
The problem with H.264 is there is a conflict of interest involved. Microsoft
and Apple have lots of money riding on the adoption of H.264. If it is the
standard, they directly profit.

In the medium to long term, end-user quality is negatively affected by
adopting close standards.

~~~
binspace
Also, the lawyers have promised to basically sue open source developers who do
not pay royalties.

~~~
astrange
Mozilla and Opera have promised everyone that they would be sued for royalties
(and there's no reason not to believe them), but I've never seen evidence of
this. Nobody is ever going to sue Perian/ffdshow/VLC for royalties.

~~~
robryan
Still, even if they probably won't get sued they would always have it hanging
over their heads. Making an investment in technologies which even have a small
chance of causing legal trouble at some point in the future could be a bad bet
for them.

------
mclin
_iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows
software you can possibly think of._

I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I
got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too.

Damn you beach ball!

~~~
mr_justin
Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it
up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading.
iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod
or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music
organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the
operating system.

That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as
enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.

~~~
mclin
I don't mean it crashes. I just hate how unresponsive it is.

It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding
songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI
programming. Do your I/O in a background thread.

I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it
won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever
task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing.

This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.

~~~
Terretta
Out of curiosity, is your library on an external disk that sleeps? Mine was,
and it seemed to hang while waiting for the disk to spin up. I moved it to an
always on disk, and the hangs stopped.

------
archgrove
The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about
- performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's
a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree
with large tracts of the author's argument.

Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the
latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a
3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new
features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have
really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt
enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been
this slow, just that they _are_ this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt
Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim
is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows
being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened.

He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the
best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's
nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of
other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the
authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was
developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a
licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a
single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's _no_
difference at all there.

~~~
nkassis
I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and
open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that
Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points
out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully
embracing the idea.

~~~
rimantas

      I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been
      an open standards company
    

We cannot. I strongly disagree. At least in the web space there is a lot of
innovation comming from or strongly supported by Apple.

~~~
nkassis
Not claiming they have never done anything for the community but they have far
more closed projects than open ones.

~~~
rimantas
It's complicate. I believe each and every of their closed project depends a
lot on a number of open ones—just take a look at _Settings- >About->Legal_ on
iPhone or take a look at <http://www.apple.com/opensource/>. On the other hand
they do not contribute to all of OSS they use. But
<http://www.opensource.apple.com/> is still impressive.

------
mattmiller
I don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash
that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a
feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets
attention.

It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well
accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least
that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS
maker is trying to push that trend.

The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is
bad for Apple.

~~~
tomlin
Windows users don't hate Flash nearly as much as OSX users. Performance plays
a role, no doubt.

~~~
commandar
Mac users seem incapable of distinguishing between a bad format and a bad
port. Flash on OS X is the latter; Flash runs about the same on my 2.16GHz C2D
MBP as it does on my 1.6GHz Atom netbook. I don't run around foaming at the
mouth about how irredeemably bad Flash is, though.

~~~
slantyyz
That's a pretty sweeping statement.

I hated Flash on Windows.

I happen to hate it more on Mac.

I would go so far to say it's a bad format AND a bad port. It's not an either-
or situation. Just because Flash sucks less on Windows doesn't mean it's a
good format.

------
tlrobinson
iTunes sucking on Windows doesn't make them hypocrites, it helps prove their
point.

I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes,
but it's necessary to sell more iPods.

~~~
CoryMathews
iTunes sucks on windows because it does not take advantage of windows. If
windows was the iPhone and iTunes was an app it would have been banned a long
time ago.

~~~
tlrobinson
Exactly. Replace "iTunes sucks on Windows" with "Flash suck on iPhone" and
"Windows" with "iPhone SDK" and you're making his argument for him.

Not that I agree with their policies, but this article's arguments aren't very
good.

~~~
boucher
It's an incredibly simple claim. Apple is engaging in hypocritical policies.
Apple forbids actions on its own platform that Apple uses to make money and
gain market share on other platforms. I don't see how you can interpret this
any other way.

~~~
chc
That isn't hypocrisy. Jobs isn't saying he believes that people _must never_
create cross-platform apps — he's just saying that they suck (as this author
acknowledges Apple's cross-platform apps do) and thus he doesn't want them on
his system.

It's like the owner of McDonalds not wanting to take his wife to a McDonalds
for their anniversary — he's not saying nobody should eat there, just
acknowledging that it's rather low-class for the given situation.

~~~
boucher
This is a terrible analogy. In the real situation, Apple has forced developers
not to use third party technologies, ever. In your hypothetical, the owner
chooses not to go to McDonalds on occasion.

An apt analogy: The owner of a four star restaurant says that McDonalds is
shit food, and refuses to let patrons who eat at McDonalds into his
restaurant. Then, when not at work, this owner goes and eats at McDonalds.
That's what is happening here, and yes, its hypocritical.

~~~
chc
I imagine it looks terrible because you missed the whole point. Apple doesn't
care if you make cross-platform apps (eat McDonalds) — they just don't want
them on their high-end mobile platform (their anniversary). They are perfectly
happy to have them on Windows (their lunch break) or to have patrons who eat
at McDonalds occasionally (have non-iPhone cross-platform apps).

Jobs' position is that cross-platform apps suck. Apple is mainly concerned
that iPhone apps don't suck. If Windows apps suck, Jobs isn't going to cry too
much.

------
S_A_P
I see some of his points, but he is missing the bigger point. (And Steve's
letter actually fails here too)

They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about
creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.

------
digitallogic
While I do think that the Jobs letter is littered with hypocrisy, I don't
think comparing iTunes to Flash is a fair analogy. One is a single self
contained application, and the other is a framework/runtime.

------
jaimzob
What happened to OSNews? I remember it being a pretty good tech news site a
while back but now it seems that every day there's another over-written,
hyper-ventilating, peanut-gallery-baiting "opinion piece" like this. Good for
selling ad impressions I guess.

~~~
schammy
You didn't actually read the article, did you? It makes a lot of very good and
perfectly valid points.

Let me also guess - you own a Mac and an iPhone, and are mad because someone
is saying bad things about your precious Apple. Correct?

~~~
jaimzob
My point is that, as you’ve ably demonstrated, there are innumerable sites I
can go to to indulge in juvenile tech tribalism. OSNews used to be a cut above
these sites but it doesn’t seem to be any more. I think that’s a shame.

With regard to the author’s points, they may be sincere but I don’t find them
convincing. For example, no matter what you think of the quality of Windows
iTunes, the idea was never to commodotise the underlying operating system. A
calmer and more convincing argument against Job’s statement would simply be to
ask what if Microsoft decided to “preserve their UX” by banning any agent that
rendered HTML5?

------
jsz0
I also do not understand how it's hypocritical unless you believe the idiot
assumption that one has to commit fully to open or close standards
exclusively. Jobs has a much more pragmatic view and I cannot recall any point
in which he suggested otherwise. The one thing his open letter makes clear is
that Apple is not very interested in advancing _other companies_ closed
platforms especially if it undermines their own. That's completely a
completely rational approach. I'm not sure why people are so compelled to
project these idealogical purity tests on others. It's childish.

------
akkartik
Fake Steve Jobs: [http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-
about-...](http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-
gizmodo-doors-being-broken-down-etc.html)

------
aufreak3
I buy Apple's lines on this one. For long, I've been going "Grrrr...." over
Flash heating up my macbook pro when run under MacOSX, but running much cooler
(as in temperature) under windows on the exact same hardware. So much for
cross-platform-ness.

... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize
its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads.

Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire
category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going
"Grrrrr..."!

~~~
aufreak3
I don't mean that AK is involved in scratch, but that's the _kind_ of
educational stuff that seems to be on his radar.

------
youngnh
I was wholly expecting his argument to address this quote:

If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools,
they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third
party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third
party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our
developers.

with respect to "private api" arguments made here:
<http://www.marco.org/500743718>

------
almakdad
MS Windows developers aren’t dependent on some third party cross-platform
technology to adopt the latest iTunes APIs changes. Whereas, iPhone developers
using third party cross-platform tools such as Adobe’s Flash will be at the
mercy of Adobe and can only move as fast as it can.
[http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-
thought...](http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thoughts-on-
flash)

------
navyrain
The author really took the microsoft analogy a bit far. "adobe": 10 times.
"microsoft" 12 times.

------
codingthewheel
As much as I dislike Apple's current philosophy, most of Jobs' complaints are
on the money.

------
stcredzero
Holier than Adobe - this is not a very high bar!

------
hartard
Do you like giving hand jobs? Do you like getting hand jobs?

That makes you a hypocrite too.

------
kqueue
umm. I don't think the author knows what hypocrisy means.

------
aneth
The only people I know defending Adobe and Flash are Flash developers and
Adobe itself. Everybody else tolerates Flash begrudgingly. I miss a few flash
games here and there on my iPhone. Beyond that, good riddance. Flash is the
RealPlayer of the decade.

~~~
apphacker
I started using Amazon Video which uses flash. I like to be able to view
movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am,
and as of right now that's only possible with flash. I doubt Amazon would make
this a direct video since Flash permits some form of rights management for
content owners. If it were just a video I could download it and distribute it
how I wanted. Which while ultimately is a nice idea but studios would just
then not permit things like Amazon Video and so I like that Flash has enabled
me to enjoy the content I want the way I can.

~~~
stcredzero
_I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on
whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash._

Silverlight?

------
hackermom
Oh, look, it's Thom Holwerda with a new pair of blinkers on his head covering
all possible perspective than what's in front of his own nose. zZz.

------
GrandMasterBirt
YES Thank god. The video codec is 100x worse than flash. At least SWF is open,
so you can generate SWF files royalty free from adobe. H264 aint quite that. I
tunes sucks, hate it, and no itunes for linux. Hey remember itunes + palm?
Yea? We're open my ass. If Apple is so devoted to breaking people free of
proprietary crap explain the itunes-palm pre wars.

~~~
rafa8a
They have the right to control their platform. We as consumers can decide to
buy or not to buy those products.

