So ever since Himself posted his small note on Flash, the chorus has come up loud and long from the paste-eaters. “How can he criticize Flash for not being open when Apple controls the whole iPhone ecosystem WAH WAH WAH FREE FREE FREE FREE SOFTWARE FREE MUMIA WAH” et cetera. As usual, they are missing the point.
Obviously, Apple controls the iPhone ecosystem – it’s their product. You can disagree with this if you like, and you can build a good case that they shouldn’t keep such a tight grip on it. But when Himself is beating the drum for open standards like H.264 and HTML5, it’s because nobody else controls those. As long as Steve Jobs runs Apple, you will never – EVER – see support on the iPhone OS for any sort of closed system run by somebody other than Apple.
The tedious workup again: Adobe makes tool. Apple allows tool. Tool becomes necessary to a non-trivial percentage of iPhone/iPad applications. Suddenly, Apple’s production is dependent on making sure they don’t break support for Adobe’s tool – and more importantly, Apple is at the mercy of Adobe for upgrades and fixes to said tool. Do you think Himself will ever yield that kind of control to any company, let alone one as Mac-negligent as Adobe (who have JUST NOW, nine years on, released a fully-native version of Photoshop for OS X)?
As an aside, I’ll point out that I think the assertion that cross-platform makes for shit is pretty apt. Remember the early days of Java, with “write once crash anywhere”? How about now? Java apps are insanely slow and look like shit – unless you employ native API calls. At which point you’re not cross-platform anymore, and you may as well skip the Java.
Now, all of this sets aside stuff that should be obvious to anybody who supports computers for a living: Flash is a buggy, CPU-hogging, security-breaching sack of shit whose main application in 2010 seems to be stupid Facebook games and insanely annoying ads. I have yet to see a use case for Flash on a phone – which is handy, because I have yet to see Flash on a phone (other than lecture demos and Flash Lite, neither of which gives me any reason to think the whole thing would run great on a mobile handset).
The ongoing wailing about Flash on the iPhone boils down to one thing: people are still trying to create the desktop computer on a handheld device. It’s not going to happen on Himself’s watch at Apple. It’s just not. Whether it happens in Mountain View, or Redmond, or with HP’s acquisition of Palm, is up for grabs. But “Windows Everywhere” was an actual Microsoft slogan for a while, and the need to tie everything to Windows is what killed their mindshare and made them an also-ran everywhere off the desktop. Apple is taking it one step further and asserting that the future of mobility computing bears no resemblance to what you’d do on a desktop – and that it is THE future of computing to go in that direction. If you don’t buy it, just count the number of OS X sessions at this year’s Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. I’ll wait. Oh, back already? You see my point.