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Apple products bring progress, but at the cost of major setbacks

Recently, Steve Jobs stated that Apple will faze out support for Adobe Flash, part of a tirade on the entire industry.

They are lazys. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.

True, Flash takes up some resources, and does this inconsistently across browsers and platforms. But it is also a widespread technology that runs on 98% of all computers and and enables 75% of all videos on the web. Apple also bears some of the responsibility for issues arising from running Flash on its OS. And saying that HTML5 could simply replace Flash is a huge overstatement. Flash is still more powerful, and HTML has not yet agreed on a common video format across browsers. And a Flash developer worth his salt can create Flash Applications that don’t crash the Apple OS, which rarely happens anyway.

But what is Steve Jobs real problem with Flash?

If I had to guess, it is that Flash allows applications to run in web browsers. This is a serious challenge to Apple’s App-based business model that it developed for the iPhone and iPad. If you could play games for free online, including in your iPhone and iPad webbrowsers, would you really be buying as many Apple Apps? Viewing Steve Jobs’ stance on Flash from that angle, his comments seem more than disingenuous.

2 steps forward, one step back

Apple creates great products, there’s no two ways about it. But in trying to corner a market and ‘destroy’ competition, it also sets back user experience. While the iPhone is a great personal mini computer, it has terrible coverage as a phone, is challenged as a web browser because its lack of support for Flash, meaning that users are excluded from most video content on the web, not withstanding have a dismall experience when browsing sites that run Flash applications. For me, Apple pretty much killed video calling on the phone, because their is only a camera on the back.

Apple also stifles innovation emerging from companies other than Apple.

A great example is Google Voice. Google launched an App that would allow users to make cheap calls, and Apple did its best to kill it. Apple wins, but the consumer loses.

But Google got around this by launching Google Voice in HTML5. There is no way for Apple to stop Google from delivering their service now. Is that why Steve Jobs launched a tirade against Google as well?

We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them. This don’t be evil mantra: It’s bullshit.

The no competition doctrine

It is starting to sound like Apple believes both Google and Flash fall short in Jobs’ eyes because they present heavy competition for Apple’s money cows. Exactly what is wrong with Google trying to enter the phone market? Google is an internet based enterprise, consumption of web based media is increasingly going mobile, and Google enters that market space by creating its own phone. As far as I can tell, that increases competition, puts pressure on pricing models, creates consumer choice and spurs innovation. An all-round win for the consumer.

Dictators don’t like to play fair

So just for fun, lets compare the traits of dictators with the Steve Jobs’ latest stance.

Dictators don’t like free opposition parties. Apple trying to kill Flash and blocking Google’s Voice App are a clear indicator of their unwillingness to embrace competition and oppostion. Jobs’ anguish over Google entering the mobile phone market is another example. I mean, by that logic, the iPad shouldn’t be taking on Sony’s Reader or the Kindle either.

Dictators don’t like freedom of speech. This one is a bit of a stretch, but since we are having fun here: having your calls dropped on the iPhone incessantly can hardly be called freedom of speech.

Dictators don’t like freedom of press. Shouldn’t the press be allowed to choose its own technology? Jobs visited the WSJ promoting his Apple iPad, stating the Journal would find it ‘trivial to create video in H.264 instead of Flash’. Apparently, the WSJ was less than impressed with this statement, stating in a post that

even assuming the Journal could duplicate its Flash slideshows, infographics and other news apps using iPad-friendly technologies like Javascript, it would take a decidedly nontrivial amount of time and effort to create or acquire such a system, hire staff who understand it as well as Flash, train staff on how to use it, and integrate it into the Journal’s editorial workflow. It might be a great way to advance web standards like HTML5, and a great way to get the Journal on more devices, but it would hardly be ‘trivial’.

Dictatorships are linked to famine. You could hardly argue that mobile surfers like me have seriously seen their browser experience disrupted by the lack of flash support. There is a famine of proper user experience, using Apps cost more than the free Flash alternative and being nearly excluded from great services like Google Voice (thanks Google for bypassing Apple) seems more than a raw deal.

Totalitarianism. I would argue that Steve Jobs doesn’t like his business model to be taken on by competition and that Apple can only succeed by killing technologies that offer perfect alternatives. Personally, I am pro consumer choice and don’t like the man’s efforts at all.

A sad day for the consumer

I can only conclude that I won’t be getting Apple’s iPad, nor will I stick with the iPhone. Buying another Apple product would simply be voting for being excluded from competitor’s choices and driving up prices, and that to me is not a deal I am ready to take.

So what to do with the iPad?

Daniel Tosh found a perfect way to use the iPad. Here’s his review:

When it comes to consumer value, Jobs just doesn’t do the job.

Over to you

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