The Adobe/Apple Relationship
1 11 2007Its no secret that, being in the business of developing software for creative professionals, Adobe has traditionally had a proportionately large chunk of Mac users. With Adobe acquiring Macromedia and going all out to extend its reach to web, desktop, mobile and beyond (hosted services seems to be their next big thing) it seems that the business relationship with Apple and others is not as straightforward as before.
I think its fair to say that on a number of fronts Adobe is becoming serious competition to the established companies, just look at the potential of word processing with something like Buzzword — despite its current limitations of being run in a browser (the desktop AIR version is coming soon) it is in my mind already the clear winner. Web development has always centered around user experience and bringing that skill set to the users machine is paving the way for an entirely new desktop experience.
While it might not always be heads-on competition like Silverlight vs Flash, I can see how it is a bit unsettling to find all these software giants suddenly going for the same market space. In one sense this competition is a good thing, on the other hand it does lead to some unfortunate situations where the lack of foresight and strategic relationships causes issues.
I think nobody expects Microsoft to take an effort to distribute the Flash Player or AIR with its operating system, but what about Apple — what is happening there? Just a couple of recent examples.
- Universal binary of Creative Suite
- Apple TV - YouTube H.264 content
- iPhone - Flash support
- Leopard - CS3/Flash Player/AIR issues
This all seems to come down to Apple keeping Adobe in the loop about their plans. Now Apple isn’t the most open company and likes the “one more thing” shock approach but you’d expect them to have a interest in working closely with companies like Adobe.
The whole move to Intel processors for Apple must have been a few years in the making and as far as I understand Adobe only learned about this late in the Creative Suite development cycle. Does Apple do this with everyone? It doesn’t look like it — they successfully partnered with Google and got them to serve their YouTube video content as H.264 rather than the FLV format for Apple TV, the iPhone and iPod Touch.
I don’t know what the whole momentum was here but only recently have we started hearing about the Moviestar Flash Player release supporting H.264, was this in the works or is it Adobe playing catch-up, who knows?
Then there’s the Mac OSX 10.5 “Leopard” release, Adobe apparently did not receive a final copy of Leopard resulting in issues with some CS3 products, one major issue with the Flash Player that cripples a lot of Flash applications (FileReference upload - scheduled to be fixed in Moviestar) and reportedly also issues with AIR (not as huge a problem since its still in beta).
In my opinion this is extremely serious — Flash Player has always been about ‘not breaking the web’ and making sure things stay compatible to the point where we now have two virtual machines in there. How can the lack of communication between Apple and Adobe cause a couple thousand people to deal with broken software? How could Adobe miss the opportunity of getting embedded Flash and/or Flash Lite players on Apple TV, iPhone, iPod Touch.
It doesn’t make sense to me, nobody has anything to gain from broken software and you’d expect Apple and Adobe to stay on top of things and prevent these situations from happening. I can hardly imagine this attitude has anything to do with Aperture vs Lightroom and it is rather an organizational problem with getting the information out there than a structural failure of the two companies to work together.
There are opportunities for everyone and Adobe and Apple have everything to gain from a close strategic relationship.
Peter, sure it may not look good but perhaps it’s a series of seperarte incidents:
Apple have always broken apps. OurTunes was a great little utility until simple ITunes update killed it. And don’t take my word for it - see Sean Corfield’s response to the CS3 and ColdFusion Hic-ups with Leopard - there’s a long history of this sort of grief:
http://corfield.org/blog/index.cfm/do/blog.entry/entry/Leopard_Compatibility
MovieStar: I’ve heard that the H.264 codec for Flash has been in the pipleline and was planned for Flash 10. But other factors (Silverlight? YouTube?) forced Adobe’s hand, hence the MovieStar public beta to speed up testing.
As for iPhone: This is Apple playing “lock-in” games with carriers - see the latest update making “hacked” iPhones broken because someone wanted to put a non-certified carrier SIM in the phone. Apple can be just as ruthless as Microsoft in this area. Additionally, Adobe expect a few cents for every FlashLite player installed on a device. It’s what the current crop of carriers pay. Apple had a problem with that. I suspect Adobe are hoping public outrage will force Apple’s hand. There are technical issues too, as well as the iPhone rendering (AFAICT) full CSS3 compliant websites.
Conspirisy or circumstance?
Good points. I’m not saying these may not be separate incidents, just pointing out that there is a pretty consistent problem and its in the best interest of Apple and Adobe to prevent this from happening.
That H.264 support was indeed pushed forward was acknowledge by Ted Patrick:
“…SilverLight forced Adobe to speed up existing plans and focus on broad adoption … were driving factors in creating “MovieStar” and pushing our H.264 adoption plans forward with full 720/1080p hardware scaling support…”
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/09/silverlight-10-finally-release.php
On Flash for mobile and embedded devices I don’t get Adobe’s strategy, Flash Lite 3 is interesting but its clear that Flash content isn’t as prolific as we’d like it to be on devices. Hope they’ll review the whole licensing and distribution model for Flash Lite 3 and Flash Home to break open the market.
It appears that Adobe also isn’t extremely pro-active in working with Apple, though its of course hard to judge from my vantage point.
I agree with everything your saying here. It’s hard to speculate what each of Adobe’s seperate agenda’s are here, but they clearly both have their own self-serving agendas.
My guess is that Adobe probably has at least the same access you get by being a registered Apple developer. They would most likely have a large presence at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference, but one would hope that Adobe would have some sort of special access or insider information in terms Apple’s product roadmap. But I would bet that Apple ( a publicy traded company who’s move’s influence stock-price as well as the entire marketplace ) still keeps strategic moves under lock and key until management (SJ) see’s fit.
Another interesting thing, go to Apple’s website. Not one piece of Flash. And when you do see something move it’s Quicktime. With Flash’s move into the video space, Apple clearly see’s Flash as a competitor to Quicktime which has been a cornerstone of Apple’s OS since the early 90’s.
It looks like Apple is still using some Flash content but clearly seem to be phasing it out: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aapple.com+filetype%3Aswf
That Quicktime vs Flash video makes sense, good move by Adobe to go for the H.264 standard.
Summary of Adobe-Apple relationship and why Flash is dying …
http://2aday.wordpress.com/2007/07/09/iphone-flash-rip/
lol, that article made me smile — its interesting that there are quite a few people out there with that impression about Flash.
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.
last point from me:
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…
About the creative suite problem on intel boxes..
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
You’re missing one very big aspect of all this, and that is that Apple is fundamentally different than other companies offering Internet technologies, and I don’t mean philosophically… I mean that Adobe and Microsoft are both software companies, so to monetize their technology, it has to be proprietary, a la Flash, Silverlight (even Netscape tried to make the Internet proprietary in their day, that was their whole business model).
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 and Microsoft are both software companies, so to monetize their technology, it has to be proprietary”
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.
Actually, I didn’t say Apple wants to be “open” (though I could throw a large number of examples at you, like Darwin, Webkit, QuickTime Streaming Server, Bonjour, etc.), I said they wanted the Internet to be open… those are very different things, and frankly, having to throw out the SIM-lock issue, which has absolutely nothing to do with Internet platform technologies, doesn’t go a long way to support your argument.
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’m sorry if I misinterpreted your comments, you mentioned Apple wants to make sure everything works well with OSX but I don’t see what the operating system has to do with whatever happens on the Internet, be it proprietary or standards-based.
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.
Well, I don’t know if I would classify a bug in a rollout of a whole new operating system — a bug which can be fixed with a .01 update from either Apple or Adobe — as “breaking the web”, but that’s cool. We agree to disagree.
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.