Nigam Arora, Contributor
This article is the fifth in a series, “The Future of Apple,” designed to give investors appropriate insights on the future of the iconic company. After the passing of Steve Jobs, investors face uncertainty in shares of Apple (AAPL). Will the stock next hit $100 or $1,000?
The fifth article in this series was scheduled to provide more evidence of why patents will help Apple make billions from Google Android. In view of the breaking news on Flash, this article has taken precedence. The previously scheduled article will now be the sixth article in this series.
Flash is a multimedia platform produced by Adobe (ADBE). Flash has been the standard for adding video, interactivity, and animation to websites. It has been widely accepted that Flash enriches the web experience for the user.
Image via CrunchBase
The popularity of Flash is obvious from the following statistics produced by Adobe:
In 2010, Steve Jobs had the courage to question the applicability of the Flash technology going forward. Jobs made waves and enemies when he banned Flash from use on all iOS devices. iOS is the operating system from Apple. Jobs was almost unanimously criticized by the industry.
Jobs took a big risk banning Flash, which also precluded users of Apple devices from seeing video and animation on most sites.
Steve Jobs championed an alternate technology called HTML5. Revisiting an open memo that Jobs wrote is instructive. Here is the memo.
Thoughts on Flash
Apple has a long relationship with Adobe. In fact, we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer, adopting their Postscript language for our new Laserwriter printer. Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. Since that golden era, the companies have grown apart. Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products. Today the two companies still work together to serve their joint creative customers – Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests.
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Open”.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
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You make the supposition that Jobs, and only Jobs, took this stance on Flash within Apple. Read his bio. You’ll see that Jobs was as much a mouthpiece for the internal wisdom of Apple as for his own ideas. Other Apple executives have looked around corners and had the courage to go against Jobs, who eventually capitulated. Steve was the mouthpiece for a very capable organization. That capability hasn’t vanished.
Every word of Jobs speech was true. And, he admitted that iOS development depended on people actually coding for it and not flash, but flash was not open and not suited to the task. It was a crutch. It looks bad to Adobe to have to admit it now. Maybe the CW on the internet will realize it someday. LOL
Funny how all those iPad-like post-iPad ‘tablets’ hyping ‘flash’ compatibility have not sold, and iPad is 90+% of the market it literally created.
This article is all wrong. You quote the memo verbatim but fail to grasp the meaning.
To summarize the gist of the memo devolves into the 6th and last point. Control.
The whole fight was about control of the mobile web but more importantly Apple’s platform. Steve all but said that Adobe hijacked the Apple platform years ago causing great angst to the company. And yet you fail to grasp this important fact.
Yes, issues of security and bugs and security are all true, but this has never stopped Microsoft from running the corporate desktop.
This primary issue is about control. Apple wants to control the interface to their system so they can move the platform in the direction they want when the want. They found a convenient open platform in html5 to do this and got Google to convert flash into h.264.
The fact that they were technically right is irrelevant. The battery life issue is also important as you want your mobile phone to at least be able to run a full business day without tethering.
If you notice Microsoft Windows phone 7.x also does not support flash. Neither does the blackberry tablet.
So Jobs won, but he won in sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. iOS has been the single most important mobile platform for the past few years. The web had to support Apple because that was the most important mobile platform. Even with the rise of Android would you lose access to more than 1/2 the mobile platform because you wanted to use flash? I didn’t think so.