On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:19 AM, Paul Battley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is what scares me about Flash. Adobe's gaining a monopoly over > the internet. Being dependent on one company is a practical drawback > as well as an ideological one Flash enjoys a natural monopoly which is not entirely the same thing as an anti-competitive monopoly. MS Silverlight or Google Gears came late to the game but there were no barriers to software companies to compete with Flash. > : there's no Flash for 64-bit Linux, for > example, let alone more obscure platforms, and this is a practical > barrier to the emergence of new technologies. Java also failed to deliver on its promise even though "write once, run anywhere" was central to their strategy. Ideology often doesn't translate to practicality. Trying to support the hundreds of flavors of linux (and gaming consoles and handhelds/microprocessors) can be quite taxing on a company's resources, not to mention more bugs, more regression testing for every feature etc. > I feel the same about the BBC's embrace of Flash's cousin Air - it's > giving Adobe yet more leverage over the computing public. I can see > the pragmatic reasons, but I feel that the BBC has deeper > responsibilities than that. > Air is aiming to creep into the desktop space. Any why shouldn't it? Java set out to do the same thing. Why should developers have to go through a real hard time and rewrite and recompile their apps for each platform? > Paradoxically, I see the very closed iPhone platform as something of a > bulwark against Flash: it's popular enough - especially among a > segment of the population that makes technical decisions - that that > 2% still matters. I really hope that Apple sticks to its decision over > Flash. > You argument is in itself paradoxical. It's ironic you mention that it's a good thing that Apple doesn't support flash but you don't question their motives. Apple has more interest in controlling the vertical which is central to its own strategy and Apple's own interests have taken precedence. If the iPhone did support flash, Apple's own app store and dev community wouldn't be enjoying much if any glory and they wouldn't be able to extend their iTunes model into the app space. If Apple had really though to put the consumer first, they would support Flash because there are hundres of thousands of games and apps that can run directly off the browser and would add tremendously to the user's value proposition (but they would be free and Apple wouldn't make any money or acquire many developers for it's own platform). And again, the purported claims you make against Adobe Flash are even truer of Apple's technologies that run primarily on Apple hardware, running Apple's OS, sold in Apple stores etc. (remember the first iterations of the iPod didn't support USB? Apple even goes to great lengths to erase any traceable marks on the various chips it utilizes). (That is not to say that Apple's fanaticism about controlling the vertical is a bad thing. It actually gives them agility which is easy to see if you contrast them with Windows Mobile which has to regress each feature update or bug fix across a large spectrum of permutations/combinations of different phones, models, manufacturers, screen resolutions, input mechanisms, localizations, etc). Aleem
