I think the thing to remember here is the position that Apple was in ten years ago. The platform and the company were dying. They were completely reliant on developers like Adobe to sustain the Mac on life support and the developers were abandoning the platform in droves. Apple was forced to start writing their own apps and to start embracing open standards. There’s no evidence to suggest that Adobe would build up their core technologies as a defacto standard and then abandon Apple, but that exact scenario HAS happened in the past on more than one occasion.

What does this have to do with OS X you ask? There are already websites out there that don’t work with Macs, and it has nothing to do with Safari, which is not the only Mac browser by a long shot. It has to do with proprietary technology (from Microsoft mostly, Janus DRM and ActiveX, DirectX). Amazon Unbox is a perfect example. So is the BBC’s iPlayer fiasco. For a long time, most of the largest banks told Mac users to take a hike, etc., and that was when we all used Microsoft’s own browser.

Apple can either place their trust in outside developers to always support the Mac (which didn’t work out so well for them in the past) or they can embrace open standards and do their best to extinguish proprietary offerings.

I’m going to sign off now, as I don’t feel I’m doing an adequate job of explaining my position, but thanks for the dialogue. These issues always run so much deeper than they seem, and there are always 256 shades of gray.

With regards to “breaking a lot of the web”, it appears that the relationship between Apple and Adobe is such that they did not provide access to the release candidate of Leopard resulting in incompatibilities with the Flash Player, most notably the FileReference upload feature which is used by a good number of Flash/Flex-based applications.

I also didn’t say that Adobe’s technologies do not “closely implement” standards, only that they are proprietary, and they are… and rightly so. The only way that Adobe makes money, which is their raison d’etre, is if you have to buy their software to author on their web platform (I’m not talking about the player, I’m talking about authoring). This is not rocket science, and I’m not even saying that’s a bad business model, or that Adobe should give everything away for free and be 100% open source. I’m only saying that it is in Apple’s best interests to fight the interests of Adobe. In the long run, Apple may not care all that much if Adobe’s platform survives and becomes the defacto standard, but would they rather people chose an open-source technology instead, and will they do what they can to foster that revolt (within limits)? Yes.

And, how exactly is Apple “breaking a lot of the web”?

I don’t think thats strictly the case and we’ve seen moves by Adobe in recent years with open sourcing Flex that they’re ‘open’ to move down that route. Sure we’d all like an open source Flash Player but I think whats holding that back is more practical reasons (maintaining compatibility and not forking the player).

Flash Player is not a big money maker in a direct sense AFAIK and open sourcing it might actually help Adobe move it further.

“Apple does not want the Internet to be proprietary, because open standards mean everything will always work on OS X”

There’s a difference between proprietary and standards based, the Flash Player is not open but its still very closely implements the ECMAScript 4 standard to the point where Mozilla is using the Tamarin VM as its Javascript engine in a future version of Firefox.

Ironically enough if this would be a reason for Apple, they’re actually breaking a lot of the web — I don’t get why they would have to care about the Internet, Safari is not their core product. Internet <> OS X.

Apple caring about “open” is also not absolute if you look at earlier examples of SIM-lock, not allowing third-part applications on their new devices.

Apple, on the other hand, is a hardware company. They write a lot of software, but always to support and enhance their hardware. Apple does not want the Internet to be proprietary, because open standards mean everything will always work on OS X. They’ve battled Microsoft long enough on proprietary standards that didn’t support the Mac. (In fact, if Microsoft would have made WMA and PlaysForSure available for Mac, Apple would never have had the need to create the iPod or iTunes. How’s that for ironic?)

Apple would much rather do what they can to kill Flash and support open technologies like AJAX, H.264 and the forthcoming HTML 5 standard. It is simply not in Apple’s interest, as a hardware company, to support the proprietary standards of software companies.

And you may scoff at the idea of Apple being able to do any damage to Flash by not supporting it, but I can tell you from experience that, when the iPhone came out in June, web designers all over San Francisco were rushing around asking everyone how they could remove Flash from their sites and brushing up on their AJAX skills. And that was 1.4 million iPhones ago…

Adobe has been historically bad in keeping up with the operating systems and their capabilities. The whole reason why CS2 stopped working on intel boxes was not because they replaced powerpc api’s, but because most of the adobe products still made use of OS9 (classic) api’s, which was dropped with the intels..

About FLV vs. H264… H264 is an open format and anybody can create tools to encode to it without legal issues. Also, its technically superior for a number of reasons. Apple pushing youtube to convert to that is great news for everyone. Its not surprising the flashplayer will support it soon.. There’s literally no reason to not standardize on MPEG4 after the adoption rate of the moviestar release will have reached 90/95..

Evert

FlashLite is a PITA as far as getting out there. The distribution model is via the carriers, not the handset builders per se. The carriers are looking at their own revenue streams and if FlashLite will help push carrier content to their (locked-in) customers, then the carriers will consider FlashLite.

the Carriers are large companies. They have their own roadmaps, their own vision, their own time-table. Only now some are pushing out FlashLite 1.1 apps. Some are going from 1.1 straight to 3.0. Most of the action is coming from within the carriers themselves, not small development houses. It’s hard work to have a FlashLite app and get interest from them to gain access. The carriers model is more in tune with Pay-TV to the masses than niche applications and marketing.

Introduce Apple with their own strategies and their own way of creating lock-in and it all gets pretty messy. Bill Perry and the FlashLite crew have got a tough job. I hope they can break a few walls down because I’ve got a ton of content I want to get to a small select group of customers but that just doesn’t fit into how FlashLite fits into what the carriers want to do…

There’s obviously still a lot of evangelizing needed to get people up to speed on what Flash, Flex and AIR enable for RIA’s, desktop and eventually the mobile environment. Apple ‘ignoring’ Flash has little to no impact on its adoption or the perception of the end user, its simply a lost opportunity.

IMHO Flash content is here to stay, Flex is the development model, AIR will bring it to the desktop and Thermo will bridge the gap with the designer. Feel free to call me a fanboy but I have no doubt history will prove me right based on what I’m seeing on Adobe’s roadmap.

http://2aday.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/iphone-flash-rip/

That Quicktime vs Flash video makes sense, good move by Adobe to go for the H.264 standard.