APPLE'S DEAR LEADER Steve Jobs has decided to wax
his lyrical on why Adobe Flash is not a good thing for his followers.
The irony of Apple's feud with Adobe isn't lost on Jobs, who canters
through the history of the companies' relationship saying that both
firms had "many good times" and even a "golden era" before he slammed the software firm.
In what is clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle black, Jobs
says that Adobe's Flash products are "100 per cent proprietary".
Continuing down that road, he tries to explain that Adobe retains "sole
authority" on its "future enhancement", presumably forgetting that
people who buy his machines are also at the mercy of Apple's continuing
development of the closed source Mac OS X.
In a rare show of humility and honesty, Jobs admits that Apple too
has "many proprietary products" but says, "Web standards should be
open." He goes on to claim that Apple set standards for open standards
for browsers by creating Webkit, seemingly forgetting that the rendering
engine behind his firm's Safari web browser, among others, was actually
a fork off the original open source KHTML project. By his logic, we'll
be hearing claims that using the BSD Mach kernel at its core makes OS X
open source.
In a sign of desperation, Jobs uses figures from insecurity outfit
Symantec to justify his claims that Flash is insecure. Given that Flash
is supported on Linux with relatively few security issues, maybe it is
the operating system and not the software running above it that should
be under scrutiny.
Jobs wasn't done yet, however, using that old chestnut, battery life,
to justify barring another technology. So far he's used that as a
reason not to put 3G on the original Iphone and to delay adding
multitasking to the Iphone OS, with this one giving Jobs a hat-trick.
Just like a power-wielding politician, Jobs' shows his true colours
in his parting shot, claiming that from "painful experience", allowing
operating system agnostic development "hinders the enhancement and
progress". All that guff was really to hide behind what he claims is
Adobe's goal "to help developers write cross platform apps."
Instead, what he wants is applications that are available only on the
cappuccino firm's devices. Anything that can offer the same level of
experience on a device not blessed by Jobs is clearly something that
diminishes the appeal of the firm's expensive gadgets.
The letter ends with Jobs pleading for Adobe to stop "criticizing
Apple for leaving the past behind" and focus on supporting HTML5.
While Jobs is correct in that Adobe should look to embrace HTML5, the
idea of him preaching about open products and innovation after
identifying Adobe's "cross platform" development goal as one of the
reasons why its software isn't allowed onto his devices undermines the
rest of his argument.