

Apple, Adobe and Openness: Let's Get Real - ZeroGravitas
http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2010/05/apple-adobe-and-openness-lets-get-real.html

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DrSprout
I have to say, the Air applications I use regularly (Hulu and Pandora One)
both work very well on Linux and Windows. They are kind of resource hogs, but
then so is iTunes, so it's really a case of the pot calling the kettle black
on the performance front too. When Apple does cross-platform, they're not
really that good at it. Google and the FOSS community is fantastic at it, and
Adobe is middling.

Really, the primary thing that bothers me about Flash is the way it locks in
my content. However, it's clear that I'm not getting the content served via
Adobe Air without kill strings attached, so it's a symptom of a larger problem
in the market, and not itself the source.

~~~
tomlin
+1. Hooray for neutral-based perspectives and criticism.

~~~
stcredzero
_When Apple does cross-platform, they're not really that good at it. Google
and the FOSS community is fantastic at it, and Adobe is middling._

For some value of 'fantastic' which is close to meh. In general, the FOSS
stuff that has zero-effort portability isn't the prettiest, especially when
evaluated in terms of the native platform they're running on. The prettiest
FOSS software is far from zero-effort portability.

(Yes, this includes my own beloved Smalltalks.)

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metachris
Interesting, insightful article. It portrays the story taking the early years
of cooperation between Apple and Adobe into account.

 _> I was working at Apple when this process happened, and I can tell you that
it was searing. Apple had invested countless hours and dollars marketing those
products as prominent reasons to buy Macs, and then we saw that investment
turned against us when the apps were made available on Windows._

------
raganwald

        There's an old quote attributed to Napoleon, "If you start to take
        Vienna, take Vienna." Adobe failed to take Vienna. Note to other
        tech companies: Don't declare your intention to take over the
        world; do it first and explain later. (By the way, this explains
        both Apple's strategy and Chinese foreign policy, but I digress.)

------
stcredzero
If Adobe had more of a clue, I'd feel more sympathetic. They have a track
record of putting annoying marketing ahead of good software and the user
experience.

~~~
tomlin
I'm having a hard time thinking of a software company (who works for profit)
that hasn't put annoying marketing ahead of good software or UX.

Trendy hate tends to be very specific.

~~~
stcredzero
In today's world, you don't have to be specific, so much as aimed at the worst
offenders. No one is sinless, but there is an order of magnitude difference
between the least guilty and the most.

My hate isn't trendy. It's born of experience. One day, I was tracing down
some process eating up cycles after I installed an Adobe suite to read PDFs.
Lo and behold, it's a VB script process in the background to promote some sort
of integration marketdroid crap with MS Office.

I stop using Adobe, and my PDF reading is faster and my machine has more
cycles I can use.

~~~
tomlin
> "I stop using Adobe, and my PDF reading is faster and my machine has more
> cycles I can use."

Great. I agree that Adobe has some pretty shitty software. No doubt.

My point is that Apple has some shitty software as well. iTunes comes to mind.

\---

Shitty Adobe software: "I stop using Adobe"

Shitty Microsoft software: "I stopped using Micro$oft"

Shitty Apple software: <insert external fault here>

~~~
stcredzero
Either you can't see ahead one logical step, or didn't take the time. (or this
is a game to make me type the obvious)

For me, Shitty isn't a Boolean. It's a quantity or a qualitative assessment. I
use Microsoft and Apple software because those particular examples haven't
exceeded the threshold.

Adobe is in a different league. Different order of magnitude, really.

(And for the record, Mobile Me chased me off because it exceeded the threshold
awhile back.)

~~~
tomlin
Trouble is, you're talking about _you_. Who may be perfectly logical and make
sound decisions in the software you use based on the _quantified_ experience.

I've used enough Adobe software to confidently say that _all_ of their
software is not shitty. In fact, a few tools are indispensable. Photoshop,
Aftereffects, Premier come to mind.

In this "Adobe vs. the world" motif, all I see is: Adobe the dirtbag, and
Apple the renegade hero with faults that preclude their existence.

I, for one, am sick of it. While some of it has plenty of merit, the rest of
it is tea-bagging, Republican-style fact-swaying that results in false
information and a false result.

Due to the assumptions laid forth for the "greater cause", we end up with no
resolve. Just a table of "how we feel about Adobe" to reference without the
bother to verify any positions or information or learn any lessons going
forward.

The gang mob anti-Flash movement carries with it an original truth that no
longer exists in it's current form. Which is: The Flash Player platform should
be open. I tend to agree.

But what we end up with is: Death to plug-in arch (a complete opposite of
open-web, IMO), death to experimental UI, death to technique that exists
outside of W3C. Not understanding that Flash compilers are open source. Not
understanding that frameworks like Flash carry with it underestimated
advantages to moving the web forward.

This comment will likely get downvoted (if anyone even reads this far before
deciding I am _pro adobe_ ) and some dude with a backhanded comment goes up.
Logical? Nope. Trendy. Yes.

We're not learning anything from Adobe nor is Adobe learning anything from
their market. That's their problem, true.

But it's 2010 and we're getting video in our browsers...finally. And the bad
guy is Adobe.

Think about that.

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DeusExMachina
Very good analysis of the relationship between the two companies and the goals
of each one. But I disagree on this passage:

 _As a PostScript developer you were welcome to work with Adobe's low-quality
font technology, but Adobe refused to allow any developer to access its
proprietary high-quality APIs.

Sounds like something Apple would do, doesn't it?_

There are a lot of things I, as a developer, don't like in Apple decisions on
iPhone development and App Store policies, but to my record I've never seen
such a behavior from Apple.

Apple does not deny developers to use high quality technologies for its
platforms, apart of the private API, but that's another matter.

So I might miss something, but in my opinion, if you work on an Apple platform
you get from Apple all the technologies to work on it.

~~~
DrSprout
>Apple does not deny developers to use high quality technologies for its
platforms, apart of the private API, but that's another matter.

No, I'm pretty sure that's exactly the matter. Only Apple apps can multitask.

It's an understandable design decision, but it's certainly a parallel. (And to
be completely fair it's changing, but you're being intellectually dishonest.)

~~~
DeusExMachina
Yes, this is a point I wasn't thinking about. But in iPhone OS 4 multitasking
is coming and is similar to the android one.

But I think (my personal opinion, not backed by any data) that this was a
decision based on technical matters. From the quoted passage it seems that
Adobe was keeping the technology for itself to outpace competition. I don't
think this applies to Apple using multitasking while developers can't.

~~~
vetinari
It is similar to Android in the sense, that it works using the same
principles.

It is not similar in the sense, that on iPhone you have some specific usage
scenarios you can use with multitasking. On Android, it is open-ended, you can
multitask for any reason you come up.

------
jonhohle
With the exception of Tamarin, I don't recognize any of Adobe's open source
contributions (perhaps that's because I'm not a Flash developer).

Apple on the other hand has released a lot of great software under open source
licenses: WebKit, launchd, bonjour, Darwin, libdispatch, etc.

Adobe calling Flash open compared to the corpus of actually open software that
Apple has produced is disingenuous, in my opinion.

~~~
vetinari
On the other hand, Apple had to release WebKit, due to KHTML license (the same
for CUPS).

Other Apple open source software has exactly zero adoption outside OSX, which
is also a reason why they are open source. Apple knew they will be not
adopted.

~~~
glhaynes
I believe some substantial chunks of Apple open source (Grand Central Dispatch
and LLVM) have been or are being adopted by FreeBSD. I'm not sure how much,
though, these are part of the FreeBSD project itself.

------
leviathant
"Here's a list of some major PC software products. Do you know what they all
have in common? They were first successful on Apple systems, and only later
took off in the PC world."

Call me crazy, but maybe the PC is easier to develop for. At least the
software listed there is still available for the Mac. When Apple bought
Emagic, production of the PC version of their digital audio workstation Logic
ceased.

I remember the year Photoshop's sales for PC were higher than Photoshop's
sales on the Mac. More and more, the myth that Macs are better for creative
software eroded.

Nonetheless, it does basically boil down to philosophical differences. I'm
still a big fan of my iPhone and will probably even get the iPhone HD (or
whatever), but Apple's made it very difficult for me to transfer that
enthusiasm to anything else they do.

~~~
stcredzero
_Call me crazy, but maybe the PC is easier to develop for._

Not crazy, but maybe confused. Wouldn't _market share_ be a better
explanation? The profit motive is the primary motivation to develop for any
platform. It easily trumps ease of development.

~~~
vetinari
At the time, Win32s/Win32 was definitely easier to develop for than MacOS
classic.

While Win16 was definitely very similar to MacOS classic, Win32 brought better
multitasking and memory management, so developers could tell good bye to
memory handles and locking/unlocking them.

The tools for Win32 development were also better. There was a range of
compilers and IDEs you could choose from (not only Microsoft, but also Borland
or Watcom). For MacOS, you had the terrible Apple tools or Codewarrior kit.

Note that the apps that were created on PC, never crossed to Mac (e.g. AutoCAD
or 3D Studio).

I'm not saying that PC market share was not primary motivator, but at the
time, PCs were technically better.

~~~
stcredzero
AFAIK "is" is present tense!

------
neovive
_"Unfortunately, the development of those standards has been incredibly slow
and political"_

I think this is a critical point. It appears that most large software
companies participate in standards bodies, simply to look out for their own
interests.

~~~
raganwald
"The civil service was united in its desire to make sure that the common
market didn't work. That's why we went into it."

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIXH3-A8zMI>

------
Tamerlin
"A platform vendor is responsible for articulating exactly what developers
will and will not be permitted to do, before they invest time and money."

Apple has a history of being very capricious about that.

------
yardie
I'd have more sympathy for Adobe if:

\- Visiting Youtube didn't result in all 8 bars on my menubar, representing my
3GHz CPU, shoot to 80%.

\- The developers that wrote the god forsakened CS4 installer got the same
treatment as terrorists.

\- Products weren't being held in beta forever and shipped in a reasonable
timeframe.

~~~
stcredzero
I guess shipping stuff in beta is ok. (Google)

