Look, I love my Mac products. I was a PC user up until five years ago, and once I switched, vowed never to go back. But Steve Jobs is starting to act like a royal douche bag.
Look, I love my Mac products. I was a PC user up until five years ago, and once I switched, vowed never to go back. But Steve Jobs is starting to act like a royal douche bag.
Besides this totally outta line (and illegal) raid on the Gizmodo tech blogger who reviewed the next gen iPhone, Job’s has now taken on Adobe.. and this hits closer to home.
Adobe is the industry wide digital and and motion graphic software company. They created the indispensable Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign suite of graphic programs, and also own the web creating suite of (former Macromedia products) Dreamweaver and Flash.
All video content on the web runs on Flash — Hulu, YouTube, MSNBC,… US! Everyone who shows you video has a player that is created out of Flash. If you’re an iPhone user you’ll notice how you don’t get to see any video online (aside from the special deal they have with YouTube.) For some reason Job’s decided to cut Flash support out of iPhone/iPad development. Jobs gave a bunch of reason that seem rather slim, including battery life and security, but considering Adobe is an industry leader one would be hard pressed to believe they could do nothing to improve the interface between the products.
Bottom line, Job’s wants to cut out the middleman. Look what he did with the record industry; he created both the product (iPod) and the service (iTunes) by which most of the world will access music and other down-loadable media. Good for Apple dominance, seemingly convenient for us (for now), ultimately bad for competition in the marketplace.
The only way web development can stay democratic is that the “tool” developers use are shared easily across the web. With Flash being cut out of Apple portable devices, this makes it more difficult for a site like ours to stay competitive. We’d have to hire an apple developer to create a media app which will work on all their products, instead of one which works across all browsers no matter the hardware as Flash does now.
And I still think iPad is a douchie name for that over-grown gadget.
Whatever went down between Adobe and Apple, doesn’t look to be easing anytime soon. Adobe recently released a statement saying that they were going to focus on development with “Google, RIM, Palm, Microsoft, Nokia and others.” It used to be Mac v. Microsoft, now its Mac v. everyone else… and I won’t assume Google will take this lying down.
Jon Stewart pretty much sums it up: