In
the wake of the iPad
launch, Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs launched into a
cross-country media tour. Even as his much ballyhooed tablet
was being picked
apart by critics who questioned its ability to serve as a
competent eBook reader, Mr. Jobs visited The
Wall Street Journal and
other major news industry players in an effort to boost the device's
public perception.
However, Mr. Jobs found the folks at
the WSJ were
asking him the same question, a question that had infuriated him time
after time -- "Why doesn't the i<device> have
Flash?"
Jobs' mobile
devices boycott of Flash, one of the most widely used internet
formats, is close to extraordinary. Even Microsoft, who has its
own competitive format (Silverlight) has cooperated with Adobe in
ensuring Flash runs smoothly on Windows PCs and is ported to Windows
smartphones. Apple, meanwhile, has been almost the only major
player to play the role of Flash obstructionist.
Apple has its
reasons. Flash on a base level provides a very real threat to
Apple's lucrative App Store, one of the key things that it uses to
differentiate the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad from its competitors.
If Apple adopted Flash, many of its developers could move to Flash
which would free them of the restrictions of Apple's App Store
approval process. And that would ultimately ruin the
exclusivity of Apple's app catalog and make Apple vulnerable to
handsets with superior hardware. Also, with Flash customers
could simply view TV episodes from Hulu for free, rather than buy
them from Apple's iTunes store.
To try to obscure this fact,
Mr. Jobs has stepped
up his attacks on the format. At the WSJ
meeting,
he reportedly called Flash a "CPU hog" and a source of
"security holes." And he smartly jabbed, "We
don't spend a lot of energy on old technology."
He then
claimed that Apple was responsible for getting people to abandon a
host of technologies including floppy drives (by lack of inclusion in
the iMac), old data ports (including its own), CCFL-backlit LCD
screens (Apple now uses LED backlighting), and, most questionably,
CDs (he says CDs are dying due to Apple's iPod, iTunes Store,
CD-ripping software and the "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign).
The reality distortion field seems particularly in full blast with
the last claim, as there were 300 million CDs sold last year (that's
80 percent of all album sales industry-wide).
He followed
those dubious claims with another. Apple will get people to
abandon Flash.
Flash, he argues is simply no good. It
crashes Macs (granted, Macs have had plenty
of problems recently with nary a Flash app in sight) and runs too
slow for his tastes. He also claims that Flash would reduce the
iPad's battery life from 10 hours to 1.5 hours.
He says it
would be "trivial" for online content providers to bow to
Apple's will and replace Flash content with H.264 video codecs.
To an extent he may be right on this point -- the H.264+HTML5
movement is gaining momentum. However, even here Apple is
trying to control what is and isn't allowed. HTML 5 can also be
made to support the free Ogg Theora codecs, but Apple has tried to
block that, in favor of the expensive, proprietary H.264 format, a
source of a growing
squabble. Ultimately, regardless of which format is
embraced HTML5, though, seems unlikely to be able to offer as deep
user input and particularly the graphics-generation libraries as
Flash.