I continue to be enthralled and amused by the Apple-Adobe contretemps. In recent weeks, the drama has ratcheted up several notches, with the shipping of the iPad, and on the eve of Adobe shipping Creative Suite 5, Apple’s change in terms, blocking developers from packaging Flash apps for iThings. It was as if the Voice of Steve thundered down from Mount Olympus, ”Release the Kraken!”
Yes, the iPadcalypse is upon us. I find it thrilling. I’m a usually a mello Jack Johnson-listening vegetarian, but the Apple-Adobe war makes me want to chew raw red meat with “Achilles Last Stand” cranked to 11, as I simultaneously read dueling blog posts by Lee “Go Screw Yourself, Apple” Brimelow, and John C. “Why Does God Need a Starship?” Welch. Get Tarantino on the phone, I want to pitch InGlourious Flashers to him.
So what do I think I think?
As they say in the Book of Faces, it’s complicated.
One one hand, a lot of my friends, and people I would like to be friends with, are critters in the Adobe ecosystem. They either work for Adobe, or are closely connected in one way or another. So some part of their success is related to the success of Flash, or Adobe in a broader sense. And for these people, I wish all good things, so by extension, I root for Flash to be as ubiquitous and powerful as the evangelists say it is.
On the other hand, browsing the Web sometimes makes me feel a little like old Atlas here.
I have been a Mac user longer than I have been an Adobe user. And the Mac user in me hates Flash. If I am having any problem browsing the Web, there is a 99.9% probability that Flash (OK, Flash Player. Still.) is the culprit. Even the beloved WordPress platform that gives life to this blog suffers from Flashitis when I try to check my stats.
How much of my life has been wasted staring at a spinlocked cursor whilst some animation gets all its bits in order (if indeed it ever does)? How many dancing babies trying to entice me to refinance my mortgage must I endure? I care not to know. It would just make me sad. And for this reason, I fully understand Apple’s policy of blocking Flash, even cross-compiled Flash, from the iPhone/iPad/iPod. When John Q. Websurfer’s cursor starts spinning, Apple’s going to catch the crap because they make the thing he’s holding in his hands. Spinning cursor = iPad is slow and lame.
And, on the third hand, the consumer in me just doesn’t care. I don’t care whether my videos are H264, HTML5, H1N1, or H67-5309. They just have to work and look good. By the same token, I couldn’t care less what kind of paintbrushes VanGogh used, what kind of amplifier Jimmy Page used, or what kind of freezers Ben and Jerry’s use. I just care about the experience of seeing Starry Night, hearing “Achilles Last Stand”, and tasting Cherry Garcia. There are limits to geekdom. You can’t be a geek about everything. Renaissance geeks scare me.
I also wonder about the possibility of Apple buying Adobe. Steve Jobs is sitting on a ginormous mountain of cash ($41 billion). Today, Apple stock hit an all-time high, and they beat sales estimates across the board, for Macs, iPods, and sold a ridiculous 8.75 million iPhones. Apparently the lack of Flash isn’t toooooooo much of a drag on sales, eh?
To put things in perspective, Apple’s current market cap is almost $222 billion. Adobe’s is $18.4 billion. That makes Apple twelve times the size of Adobe. Not exactly Kraken vs. Perseus proportions, but definitely not a clash of equals.
Since a mere 10 miles separates the Infitinte Loop from Creative Suiteland, Jobs could send a 100% carbon-neutral bike courier over to Adobe with a cashier’s check for 20 big ones, and still have enough left over to buy Iceland (with their Bjork/herring/volcano fueled GDP of $11 billion). Dear Steve, I’ve taken the liberty of mapping out the route.
Even so, Apple is pushing every advantage to the limits of hubris. It may be their tragic flaw. And the fictitious fact remains that little Perseus did defeat the giant Kraken, with the help of another titan. Maybe Adobe is PerCS 5.0…
Stay tuned.
Filed under: Adobe, Apple | Tagged: Adobe, Apple, CS5, Flash | 8 Comments »















