Ninety-Four to Go?
As a follow-up to this proceeding post, I wonder if Adobe's use of this "error" screen when an iPhone attempts to view Flash content is analogous to Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to church doors?
This has to be painful for a lot of Apple faithful, since many, many of them use and/or develop for Flash; having your Pope tell you that it's a venal sin to do your job must feel like being a good Catholic prostitute.
Okay, yeah, we'll retire the analogy. I don't need hordes of silhouetted hipsters carrying Jonathan Ive designed torches and pitchforks surrounding my bunker.
3 Comments:
Hi Marc! Sorry I missed the previous anti-Apple post, but I'm just not making sense of what you're trying to say here. My understanding is that Flash not running on iPhone is an Adobe failing, not an Apple one.
But I'm mainly flabbergasted by the claim that "Apple is stifling innovation." Like me, you're old enough to remember pre-iPhone cell phones. They were, utterly without exception, a disaster. It's like the industry innovated until it was about 18 months old, and then decided the software on its devices could forever stay the same, and only the hardware would be incrementally improved. The iPhone brought the stagnant lameness of every other mobile device into sharp focus. And what was the industry's response? Innovation? No! -- it was to see who could most closely copy the iPhone without violating Apple's patents! The next major innovations will apparently come with the (hopefully soon forthcoming) iPhone overhaul.
Multitouch mice. The iMac body form. The PC as entertainment center. Three of hundreds of ideas that Apple created and everyone else either has copied or will copy. Not to mention Windows, which for over 10 years has succeeded exactly to the brazenness with which it's copied the Mac OS.
I'm not an Apple zealot. Heck, I use Windows much more then Apple. But it's clear to me that Apple *drives* innovation in the industry (actually, now in several industries), and that you benefit from their innovation even if you never touch an Apple product.
I respect your opinion, and would never accuse you of being a member of the cult of white earbuds, but we clearly disagree on Apple's innovation. I think the bulk of their expertise comes less from new concepts and more from design and synergy. It's interesting that not one of the three examples you've cited is an Apple original: there were unibody machines running DOS, for heaven's sake, and if memory serves EPCOT had a concept "entertainment computer" in the late '70s. I am much more interested in seeing what will happen with Apple's apparent move away from computers as their core competency, and using their desktop and laptop businesses primarily as R&D for consumer electronics.
Oh, and let me clarify one (admittedly small) inaccuracy in your statement. While I could devote several posts to Apple-bashing, this is really Apple-zealot-bashing. Apple and Microsoft are both corporate monoliths who don't give a rat's ass about their customers; that's capitalism, baby. I don't really care what consumer products someone chooses to use, but people who think that a choice of operating system defines your worth as a human are worthy of my ridicule.
PS: The technical side of the Flash/Apple conundrum has to do with root access to the device, or so I was told. It's an Adobe problem that Flash was built to require it (instead of Java's sandbox concept), but Apple's problem in (a) not providing sufficient technical insight to find a solution, and (b) pretending that consumers don't want Flash, anyway. (Which has been their attitude about many features they didn't initially want to provide (e.g., two-button mice, non-DRM music.)
Here's a story: I work at a non-profit arts org that employs about 15 people. Sometimes I think that the management considers computer illiteracy a job qualification, because I, with my barely-average tech skills and the ability to use the search function on lifehacker, am the IT department (mind you, this is on top of my regular full-time job -- IT isn't even mentioned on my job description). Our network, despite being redone by "experts" more then once during my time, is a mess -- we've got everything from Win2K to Vista, and more recently Server2008. Since everything is old and falling apart, and replacements only get made when all else fails (and at the lowest possible price point), everything is slipshod and slapdash, and stuff is constantly being moved around.
Well, never once has it been a straightforward process to get a new computer talking to the Windows network. I need to manually point each machine to the IP of the DHCP server, beg and plead, try again when it's not raining, and occasionally it still doesn't work. Exactly once was it painless to add a computer to the (Windows, mind you) network -- when a grant of some sort coughed up an iMac last year. I plugged in the CAT5, turned on the machine, and it auto-detected the network and asked for a username and password associated with it. Once. Since then, it has been the ONE computer that has no problems doing anything. This is out of maybe 20 machines running five different operating systems. The Dell Vostros running Vista have as many, or more, problems as the now-older Mac.
Both of us remember the distinction between pre-iPhone dell phones and post-iPhone devices (exactly 100% of which are near-iPhone clones, mind you), but it will be difficult to explain to anyone who was younger than 18 when the iPhone came out.
You can define "innovation" in a lot of different ways, and admittedly "stealing good ideas when they come along and putting them together in products that JUST WORK" sounds like a pretty weak way to do it. But that's where I'm at. Everything I know about design and technology tells me that what Apple does is EASY and there should be a dozen companies doing it just as well, and pushing each other towards real capital-I Innovation. But it just ain't the case. With scant exception, Apple products are just plain better, and often dramatically so. (BTW, I suspect that the inclination towards simplicity has a lot to do with this, so i don't begrudge them the lead to adopting, eg. a right mouse button.)
Am I an Apple zealot? I dunno. My main machines, both at work and at home, run Windows. I hate some of Apple's business practices, and I do recognize that they're a greed-driven capitalist monolith. But in a world where Apple has less than 50% market share, I'm going to actively root for them. I don't care whether the quality and innovation of their products comes from giving a rat's ass about their customers or from naked profit motive, because the products speak for themselves. (It also speaks for itself when other companies (Microsoft, cell phone makers, etc.) succeed exactly to the extent that they adopt technology that Apple has popularized.)
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