Just about everything Apple does suggests the company lives in a parallel universe.
It’s only in this imaginary world, where normal standards don’t apply, that someone like Steve Jobs could get away with accusing Adobe of not being “open” enough.
In a public letter yesterday, explaining the main reasons for Apple excluding Adobe’s Flash from its products, Jobs wrote that Adobe’s Flash was “a closed system” and that the trend in mobile devices was towards open standards. He writes:
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Just for fun, try and replace the words “Adobe” and “Flash” in that paragraph with the words “Apple” and “iTunes”. The irony is thick.
The irony may not have been intentional but the smokescreen no doubt was; a means to divert attention away from its own decidedly conservative approach to openness.
Apple goes out of its way to make sure that iPod and iPhone users have to use iTunes to manage their devices. And if you’re on Linux you don’t even have the, dubious, honour of using iTunes because a Linux version doesn’t exist. You also can’t simply manage your iPod through a file manager, Apple wouldn’t like that. Just because you paid for an iPhone doesn’t mean that you have the right to manage it the way you want to.
So much for open standards.
H.264: The new video wars
Its also interesting that Jobs, in a post about open standards, decides to use the H.264 video codec as an example of alternatives to Flash. Technology aside, H.264 is no better than Flash. It is a proprietary standard wrapped in so many patents that it is completely incompatible with the concept of open standards.
Simply replacing a bad proprietary standard with another, equally troublesome, one doesn’t make sense and is of no value in promoting open web standards.
Naturally it’s not really a surprise that Apple is one of the licensors of H.264, as is Microsoft, which has just announced that Internet Explorer’s HTML5 video tag will only support H.264. Opera and Mozilla, however, are sticking with the alternative, Theora, an open source and royalty-free video codec.
April 30th, 2010 @ 7:38 pm
You know, as soon as I saw that open letter from Apple, I wanted to write this exact “reply.”
Pot calling the kettle black, I say!
May 5th, 2010 @ 11:43 am
Great post.
Bottom line is that Jobs is a bloody hypocrite. He says Adobe’s technologies aren’t open enough but he still insists on tying people into that dog’s breakfast called iTunes for their iPods/ iPhones and iPads and file formats that are compatible with very little else (M4A and M4V).