"Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery," the Apple honcho [Steve Jobs] wrote. And then came the kicker in his litany: "Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin'."This email exchange is the subject of Eric Felten's WSJ column today. Felton nails it.
Mr. Tate gasped. "I don't want 'freedom from porn,'" he shot back, "Porn is just fine!"
"[Y]ou might care more about porn when you have kids..." was Mr. Jobs' response.
After some sparring with Mr. Jobs on another topic, Mr. Tate came back to what is now bothering him most: "I may sound bitter," he wrote, explaining why: "It's you imposing your morality, about porn."
My, how the definition of imposing one's morality has changed over the years. Once it meant enforcing criminal sanctions on smut-peddlers. Now, a businessman who prefers to opt out of the trade is accused of impinging on everyone else's free speech.
Also, as Tom and I discussed, if the masses are crying out for porn then Apple will find out the old fashioned way. They'll go out of business.
I will take a moment here to point out that this led to a continuation of a long-running and enlightening conversation we have been having about Flash and Apple.
Simply, Steve Jobs may be against porn. But he is more against allowing open development. He is about control.
Here's how that works in this case.*
Flash is a program that is used to make and show moving things on websites, including YouTube embedded videos. (This is an extremely simplified explanation.)
Apple can't run Flash on the iPhone.
This is because they don't care to develop the iPhone to run Flash, for whatever reason.
Therefore, Steve Jobs denigrates Flash whenever he gets a chance by mentioning things like buggy programming. I will spare you the details and slurs.
This led to an exchange of attacks between Adobe (developers of Flash) and Apple.
Until finally, Apple has shown their true colors in this fight. They make tons of money from the Apps that are sold to go on the iPhone.
A way to produce an App for the iPhone has been developed that uses Flash and then exports it (with no moving elements) as an App. Therefore, it is perfectly usable with no buggy programming.
Apple has made it a policy to refuse Apps developed using Flash, even though it does not affect the end product or the iPhone's ability to use it.
Simply put, this is about total control. Period.
Goodbye
Hello
Same as the old boss.
*This has deliberately been made extremely simple since it is a very complicated topic. However, keep in mind that complex arguments can be used to obscure real objectives, which when stripped down are fairly simple. Control. Ownership. Money. Steve Job's reality distortion field. Etc. (We love Apple in general, but we have NOT drunk the Kool-Aid.)
It is about control, but you make that sound bad. Apple has every right to "control" their own products, and as you noted at the top of the article about p0rn, Apple (and Jobs) can decide not to offer that kind of material in the App Store--it's a free market, and businesses are not infringing on anyone's "rights" by making a product with or without certain features.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm perplexed at your contradictory arguments.
On the one hand, Apple has the right to NOT support p0rn apps, but then you argue that NOT supporting Flash makes them bad.
The higher level principle in each argument is exactly the same. Apple is not "bad" by making their own decisions about what their products will or will not do.
And as you note, the market will decide if they made the "right" decision. With respect to Flash, so far, the market is moving towards Apple's approach of focusing on open standards like HTML5 rather than closed standards like Flash.
With respect to your argument that "it's all about control," I could craft easily an argument that Adobe is the bad player in this drama, because Adobe is trying to control the marketplace.
Julie,
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by exporting a Flash app "with no moving elements"? I'm genuinely curious, and curious about what difference it makes.
Will
Now, of course, running apps in the browser using Flash does an end run around the app store; but there are lots of apps that are free; and if I'm not mistaken, the development tools and SDK for iPhone apps are free as well. Does it cost money to get a free app accepted for the app store?
ReplyDeleteIf not, I'm not seeing where money comes in.
(Please note--I'm not arguing, I'm looking for info.)
Flash is a HUGE processor/energy hog, which is a major detriment for limited battery-powered mobile devices.
ReplyDeleteAlso, for what it's worth, there is a lot more history between Adobe and Apple. For example, late 80s and early 90s, Adobe did very little in supporting their applications on the MacIntosh platform because of, what Adobe perceived as, low market share. Can't really blame Adobe but apparently they also treated Apple poorly in their ignoring many of Apple's requests. Now the tables are reversed, and it looks like payback time.
Clowns to left of me, jokers to right,
here I am, stuck in the middle with you
Anonymous ... I don't mind if they want total control of their Empire. What I want is honesty. We saw Microsoft lie and take over and bully everyone who didn't do it their way until forced to do otherwise by the courts, etc. Back then the perception was "poor little Apple." As Mark points out, very few supported Apple because their market share wasn't worth it.
ReplyDeleteBut now that Apple is in control they are taking much the same attitude. That is my point. Just be honest. Don't run down Flash for being buggy. Flat out say that you don't want to dedicate the power to letting it work. Period. Don't juggle reasons until you find one that works from a PR stance.
Will, I am going to let Tom answer your question. The maestro will be in later ... :-)
Is this thing on?
ReplyDeleteI don't know where my first comment went - but I will try it again:
ReplyDeleteAnonymous: HTML5 is a long way from being viable. Since Internet Explorer will not support it until version 9 (and it will never support it on all those Windows XP machines) we have some waiting to do - we cannot even get rid of IE6. (Frankly I am hoping some clever Javascript-based framework is developed to magically allow IE 7 and 8 to handle HTML5 - that would be a real lifesaver.)
Will: As Julie said, there is a lot of oversimplification in the post. Flash apps are not so much about the "vector animation" aspect of Flash - the Apps that Flash CS5 would produce are native iPhone apps. (not SWFs). It is more that Apple does not want to enable a zillion (OK, maybe thousands) of Flash programmers to make apps in their familiar world, then publish them to iPhone, Android and any other platform that Adobe wants.
Apple wants to have as many exclusive apps as possible in their App stores (iPhone and iPad for now). Forcing developers to use Apple development tools makes it more trouble to create similar apps for Android. In the end I do not think this ploy will work. But it is probably worth it for Apple to try. (and who knows...)
Mark W: I agree Flash is a resource hog. The reason we do our web work on Windows is due to the exact problem you mention. In the old days, Flash played back too slow on the Mac's PowerPC processor. We could never get timing of animations right without a lot of back and forth to a Windows machine. I think Apple's move to Intel has solved that problem. (But here I am typing this on a Windows 7 machine)
Apple and Adobe have a long history of love and hate. Together they ushered in the era of digital graphic production. They immediately began to fight over who would control it. I think Adobe won (after all it was death match for them) but it took many battles.
I think we may be at the beginning of a similar turf war over mobile (and, end the end, maybe all) computing. Apple has the momentum, but there are more foes this time around. It is not just about Adobe and Microsoft. Add all the other phone makers, the carriers and.... enter the giant: Google.
My husband refers to both Microsoft and Apple as "Evil Empire." Yes, he's a UNIX guy. :)
ReplyDelete