Consumers have never been quite as gung ho about Apple as they are today. Not even in the early days when the Apple II was the most desired device on the planet. But Apple managed to screw up that position, and increasingly it looks set to screw up its even more popular position, for the same reason it did it last time. And there is no better example than the way it is treating Adobe.
Adobe this week has responded to the public letters of criticism from Steve Jobs, dropping its own letter to about 24 US papers, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. In essence it says that Jobs’ position in running a closed development environment threatens the future of the internet, which is a little dramatic, and that open markets are needed for developers to create the applications which customers want.
This is all melodrama since Apple can’t hijack the internet any more than Google or Adobe or Microsoft or Nokia can. The biggest threat to the internet is from ISPs who hate net neutrality, but that’s another story.
What Adobe offers is a platform that will run on any device, so that developers can build once and deploy anywhere, many times. It’s a very nice to have platform ‘ if you are a developer, but it’s not essential for the good of the internet. One way it is used is as a way for video to be deployed without anyone understanding anything about RTSP. Yes it is proprietary, which means no, it’s not essential for life on earth.
Apple is trying to use its popularity to dictate technologies. It also has years and years of Adobe being a thorn in its side in the creative markets, for instance in video editing suites and desktop publishing systems of the past. But the hatred goes deeper. Adobe, and in particular Macromedia, which it acquired, were once loyalty to Apple operating systems when then started out. The only reason that Apple had to go out and buy and build systems, which rival those designed by Adobe, was because Adobe found itself seduced by the power of Microsoft, as the Apple market share fell in the 90s and it targeted Microsoft platforms first and foremost.
Apple had to take up the slack to keep its offerings ahead in the creative industries. So there is intense dislike there, and it goes deep.
Obviously if Jobs’ arguments were correct about Adobe, and it did use too much resource, such as battery, then he should let Flash run on iPhones and iPads, and let it become widely known that it ruined their performance. Clearly that’s not his reason for disallowing Flash.
Can we think of any other examples where a major corporation risked damaging the capability of its well regarded products, in order to win a different, unrelated technology battle? Well yes, what about Sony when it decided to wreck the chances of sequential games console victories by hampering the PS3 with Blu-ray players that were coming a year too late. The Xbox 360 would have been still born had it not been for giving it a year’s head start and it has taken 4 years for the PS3 to amass similar number to the Xbox. It did, however allow Sony to win the Blu-ray war against HD DVD, but it probably makes a few hundred $millions a year in royalties against the immense profits that it made throughout its PS2 dominant years in games consoles. IT was a false economy.
Apple is in the same kind of danger. Certainly it risks being tainted with anti-trust considerations, and it risks opening the door to Android technology. It might establish HTML5 video as a global standard, but do it at the cost of losing market share in iPhones and iPads. Right now that doesn’t seem likely. Both devices remain on a high. But it will happen.
It was this desire for control, to define both the hardware and the software and by that token the entire user experience, which undid Jobs the first time around. Microsoft was happy to uncouple the hardware from the operating software, and Apple wasn’t and the Microsoft approach led to a wider variety of devices which suited a wider range of needs.
Microsoft could not have launched them all itself, and some were mistakes and loss makers, but they all led to the point where the momentum captured developers.
Which is why Apple is at a critical phase right now. Android relies on sensible hardware vendors taking sensible options and innovating above the OS line. It is a genuine partnership which promotes experimentation. Apple is controlling and dictatorial and as a result all the variety is in software, not the device.
Adobe has now complained to US antitrust enforcers, saying Apple is stifling competition by barring developers from using Flash to create apps for the iPhone and iPad, and it might actually end up with some legal actions being taken against Apple, but it is the combined action of disenchanted developers, seeing Android already overtaking the iPhone in terms of device shipments (which happened last quarter), that is the real danger.
It is a simple matter of 20 devices of broadly similar design, but with a wide variety of physical parameters, outshining a single device. This goes further, in that in its home market Apple continues to offer its lead product only to customers of AT&T. So in effect consumers are buying one of 20 Androids because they can’t get the sole iPhone, making the situation far worse an d in the coming months it is set to become more obvious as Android is used for more things.
Okay this is not the same as it was back in 1995, when Apple suddenly crashed and began to burn on the back of the onslaught of Microsoft powered devices. This is more like 1985/6 when Microsoft quietly slipped ahead of Apple in installations and gradually won the war for attracting developers over to its side, including those inventive people at Macromedia and Adobe. So it’s second time around for those organizations as well, and they will have the same kind of long memory that we have at Faultline and they would have deserted Apple over the coming years whether Flash had been allowed on the iPad or not.