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Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

309 points by mascarenhas 16y ago

digitallogic 16y ago
While I do think that the Jobs letter is littered with hypocrisy, I don't think comparing iTunes to Flash is a fair analogy. One is a single self contained application, and the other is a framework/runtime.
pohl 16y ago
I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so. But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.
- crad 16y ago
  Right, not using all the tools available in an OS is quite different than not being able to do so because of the development environment.
  - pohl 16y ago
    See...in the subtext of your post, there is the ghost of a moral claim. † So now we're getting close to the requirements for hypocrisy. Now you would just need to create a closed platform and ship it. † One that Jobs did not make, and that I do not agree with — I think any platform can make its own rules, and game consoles have set the precedent for the more closed model.
- Confusion 16y ago
  It's so hard to grasp that the author even uses 'hypercritical' as an adjective to denote an instance of hypocrisy.
  - mascarenhas 16y ago
    This was obviously a typo to me, I just skipped it and kept reading. By now several other comments here have shown that the Jobs' letter is indeed hypocritical by the accepted definitions of the term. I will even link another one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy.
- andreyf 16y ago
  I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try to explain it. There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience. But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense. Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality. A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.
  - vorador 16y ago
    I'm not sure to get your point : for instance, why a closed-source iphoneOS would be better than an open one ?
  - doki_pen 16y ago
    Jobs implies something when he says that he thinks the web "should" be open. He doesn't say it's better for Apple if it's open. Anyway, what is the point? Shouldn't we all have our own self interest in mind and not Apple's? What do I care if it benefits Apple if it doesn't benefit me? The argument should be about whether we should accept what is happening lying down, or if we should try to resist it. Just because it makes sense for Apple to behave this way, doesn't mean that we should accept it. Edit: It has nothing to do with morality. It's my own vested self interest that makes me wary of Apple. To bring up morality is a way of minimizing my views.
- acg 16y ago
  Hypocrisy is not reserved for moral claims. Jobs could be making a virtue out of openness (I'm not sure he is) or saying one thing in public and acting differently in private. Both of which, without moral claims, could cause him to be a hypocrite. Jobs could be called a hypocrite in two different senses depending on how cynical you are.
  - pohl 16y ago
    I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do. It's not enough, for example, for me to wax eloquent about how much I love the color green while I'm wearing a purple shirt. It is possible, after all, to love both open models and closed models in different contexts.
    - telemachos 16y ago
      I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do. But the author meets this standard. For example, he points out that Jobs says, in effect, that Adobe should have moved their Carbon apps to Cocoa, even though Apple hasn't done so in some cases.
      - pohl 16y ago
        Note that you have to use the weasel-phrase "in effect" to put words in the mouth of Jobs and claim that "the author meets this standard". If you're so certain he's met the standard, provide an actual quotation rather than a straw man. Jobs made no such statement. Rather, he observed that Adobe was very slow in passing Apple's platform improvements on to its customers, and the implication here is that it would be unwise for Apple to allow middleware to put Apple in a position where Adobe could do the same thing again for thousands of apps. But he made no claim about what Adobe ought to have done, or should have done. Rather, he gave a reason for the policy decisions that Apple has made.
        16y ago
- _pius 16y ago
  I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
  - cageface 16y ago
    Merriam Webster defines hypocrisy thus: "feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion" I'd say Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software fits the bill perfectly. Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time.
    - pohl 16y ago
      Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software I think a quotation to support your interpretation above would be helpful, because it's not at all what I read in "Thoughts on Flash" today. That is, I did not get the impression that Apple thought Adobe ought to deliver anything open. They were merely pointing out that it is not — and that this does not meet Apple's vision for what they want to support within Mobile Safari. In fact, he went so far as to concede that "Apple has many proprietary products too."
    - _pius 16y ago
      Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time. Great point, actually.
- orangecat 16y ago
  The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest And Mac apps. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are still 32-bit Carbon, with no indication of that changing anytime soon.
  - carussell 16y ago
    Maybe it's wrong of me to be pointing out votes, but it really irks me that the original comment is at 46 as of this writing, while yours is at 4. So I want to comment in favor of stressing the above comments, hard. Considering a substantial discussion of the semantics of the word "hypocrisy" followed, with some people taking one side, and some the other, let's make a correction to the original presumption so that even those who didn't believe it to be hypocritical can come into agreement. "The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform." is false. The claim is that since Apple ships major OS X apps that don't use Cocoa, it's hypocrisy to attack Adobe on those grounds. Edit: Actually Jobs's words chide Adobe as "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X", so the debate might be a little bit more than moot. I still think it's entirely fair, though, to ask of Apple in the same vein, "Hey, why so late for you guys to fully adopt Mac OS X?"
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - glhaynes 16y ago
    The very fact that those are some of the things that have been criticized the most (the list would have had to have included Finder until a few months ago!) and with many cries to have them converted to Cocoa may reveal hypocrisy but it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does. Many think the web has proven that cross-platform apps are fine. It hasn't — the web is its own platform.
    - zmmmmm 16y ago
- Nwallins 16y ago
  Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates? I see a normative claim: Software systems should do X, Y, and Z Software systems that do not meet the norm are penalized or disallowed by Apple's platform(s). However, Apple's own software does not meet this norm either, even on Apple's own platform. It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, even if it is defensible.
  - randallsquared 16y ago
    Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates? I would say it's hypocritical to hold those of a class including yourself to standards which you do not meet. That is, it's not hypocritical (however blameworthy it may or may not be) to say, "Everyone but me should do X, while I should do Y," but it is to say "Everyone should do X" while actually doing Y. You can see Jobs trying to avoid hypocrisy in the original post by asserting that web standards should be open, while other software systems have no such obligation.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - demallien 16y ago
    You're talking about the adoption of Cocoa and the fact that iTunes still uses Carbon? It's not really a fair accusation. I think Apple would very much like to be able to rewrite iTunes in Cocoa, but they have a problem - it's a cross-platform application. As a result they have chosen to use an API on the Mac that most closely resembles an API available on Windows. They know that iTunes is not exploiting the features available on both platforms to their fullest - perhaps painfully so. It is precisely this type of experience which makes them wish to avoid cross-platform development on their new platform. I mean Apple really does care about the user experience, more so than any other company that I can think of. And yet even they have not managed to put together a good user experience for their cross-platform app. On the Mac it isn't hooked up to all of the Cocoa hotness, and on the PC, well, the less said, the better. It is Apple's firsthand experience with the problems you can have during cross-platform development that is informing their decision to strongly discourage such development on the iPhone platform.
- telemachos 16y ago
  You seem to believe that 'hypocrisy' (and related words, I assume) can only apply to moral claims. That isn't true to the best of my knowledge, and a check of a handful of good dictionaries (online and paper) confirms this. Here's one link, for example: http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1+0&dict=A http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1... Although the charge of hypocrisy often comes up in moral contexts, that isn't a requirement.
  - dasil003 16y ago
    The older I get the more convinced I am that it's possible to define anyone as a hypocrite simply by repeatedly moving to a higher abstraction until you find a layer where what someone says and what they do are not in sync, and then you can righteously declare "hypocrite!", even though the actual conflict was generated by creative semantics (which all higher thought is). Therefore in order for a hypocrisy to be a useful word I think it needs a more rigorous connotation. I'm not saying the moral angle is the correct one, but I certainly think that Jobs' letter is far from any reasonably useful definition hypocrisy.
    - telemachos 16y ago
      You're asking for a redefinition or sharpening of a word that is often used in a sloppy way. That's fine - and potentially very useful. But my point was more limited: the parent poster writes as though vast numbers of people don't understand the simple concept of hypocrisy. That might be fine, too, except that it's his definition of 'hypocrisy' that is non-standard.
- VictorHo 16y ago
  From dictionary.com: hy·poc·ri·sy [hi-pok-ruh-see] –noun,plural-sies. 1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess. 2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude. 3. an act or instance of hypocrisy. I don't see how the author misuses the word "hypocrisy" at all. It appears to me that his case relates to #2 above - Jobs pretends to hold an attitude promoting open standards etc. when that is not the real motivation behind his actions at all.
  - KirinDave 16y ago
    That sort of presupposes a tone of sanctimony that I really don't get from the letter. I don't think Apple is trying to argue they're doing some kind of overall good, they've written a letter about how Flash conflicts with their strategic vision for their platform. What specific parts do you think suggest feigned virtue? The parts where he claims to want a better environment for developers? That's the only place where I think you might have a toehold. It must sort of suck to be Apple community relations right now. If you act according to your business plan, you get railed at for being imperious and arbitrary. If you then explain that business plan and your rationale, people immediately see it's not all nobility and grace and get pissed. The brand perception and loyalty that Apple has spent so much time building can certainly be a double-edged sword.
  - nosnih 16y ago
    What many people seem to be missing or ignoring is that he is primarily talking about Flash content on websites. Jobs said all standards pertaining to the web should be open, not all software. He admits that they have proprietary systems for native apps. Apple believes that browsing the web should not require a proprietary plugin. I don't see any hypocrisy in that.
- boredguy8 16y ago
  Neal Stephenson, "Diamond Age" "You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?" ... "Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour--you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy. ... "We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing." "That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." "Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter. (http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_greatest_luxury/ http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...)
  - donaq 16y ago
    Those are some very interesting quotes. Now, the question is, which definition of hypocrisy applies to Jobs?
- binspace 16y ago
  Steve Jobs is trumpeting open standards for the web yet supporting closed standards, hence the hypocrisy.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. There were many good points in the article, and that's only one of them. Thoughts on the others, particularly the 'openness' of H.264 or lack thereof?
- zzleeper 16y ago
  Isn't it hypocrisy to criticize someone for doing the very same thing you are doing? (ie, taking ages to adopt cocoa fully). It's even worst if you are supposed to be leading by example, as cocoa is apple's own design.
mclin 16y ago
iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too. Damn you beach ball!
- mr_justin 16y ago
  Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system. That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
  - mclin 16y ago
    I don't mean it crashes. I just hate how unresponsive it is. It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI programming. Do your I/O in a background thread. I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing. This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.
    - Terretta 16y ago
      Out of curiosity, is your library on an external disk that sleeps? Mine was, and it seemed to hang while waiting for the disk to spin up. I moved it to an always on disk, and the hangs stopped.
  - jws 16y ago
    I was just counting seconds the other day (iTunes, modern x86 mac, 40k songs or so) Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball. Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app. Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball. If you EVER see a beachball on a Mac then either your hardware is failing or your application's programmer has failed. Your programmer should NEVER do an operation that can block and make the user interface unresponsive in the user interface thread. Ever. Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?
aneth 16y ago
The only people I know defending Adobe and Flash are Flash developers and Adobe itself. Everybody else tolerates Flash begrudgingly. I miss a few flash games here and there on my iPhone. Beyond that, good riddance. Flash is the RealPlayer of the decade.
- tdfx 16y ago
  I am so glad you used that metaphor.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  I personally hate developing in flash and I hate flash websites. However I enjoy flash videos and flash games. I don't want someone telling me I can no longer play these games.
- apphacker 16y ago
  I started using Amazon Video which uses flash. I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. I doubt Amazon would make this a direct video since Flash permits some form of rights management for content owners. If it were just a video I could download it and distribute it how I wanted. Which while ultimately is a nice idea but studios would just then not permit things like Amazon Video and so I like that Flash has enabled me to enjoy the content I want the way I can.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. Silverlight?
- MichaelGG 16y ago
  Defending Flash overall or for iPhone? I hate every Adobe product except Photoshop, yet I still am upset with Apple's decision on blocking other runtimes and forcing C.
- 16y ago
S_A_P 16y ago
I see some of his points, but he is missing the bigger point. (And Steve's letter actually fails here too) They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.
archgrove 16y ago
The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument. Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened. He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.
- nkassis 16y ago
  I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.
  - rimantas 16y ago
    I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company We cannot. I strongly disagree. At least in the web space there is a lot of innovation comming from or strongly supported by Apple.
tlrobinson 16y ago
iTunes sucking on Windows doesn't make them hypocrites, it helps prove their point. I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes, but it's necessary to sell more iPods.
- CoryMathews 16y ago
  iTunes sucks on windows because it does not take advantage of windows. If windows was the iPhone and iTunes was an app it would have been banned a long time ago.
  - tlrobinson 16y ago
    Exactly. Replace "iTunes sucks on Windows" with "Flash suck on iPhone" and "Windows" with "iPhone SDK" and you're making his argument for him. Not that I agree with their policies, but this article's arguments aren't very good.
    - boucher 16y ago
      It's an incredibly simple claim. Apple is engaging in hypocritical policies. Apple forbids actions on its own platform that Apple uses to make money and gain market share on other platforms. I don't see how you can interpret this any other way.
      - tlrobinson 16y ago
        See the top comment in this thread by pohl: "it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so."
      - chc 16y ago
        That isn't hypocrisy. Jobs isn't saying he believes that people must never create cross-platform apps — he's just saying that they suck (as this author acknowledges Apple's cross-platform apps do) and thus he doesn't want them on his system. It's like the owner of McDonalds not wanting to take his wife to a McDonalds for their anniversary — he's not saying nobody should eat there, just acknowledging that it's rather low-class for the given situation.
mattmiller 16y ago
I don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets attention. It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend. The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.
- tomlin 16y ago
  Windows users don't hate Flash nearly as much as OSX users. Performance plays a role, no doubt.
  - commandar 16y ago
    Mac users seem incapable of distinguishing between a bad format and a bad port. Flash on OS X is the latter; Flash runs about the same on my 2.16GHz C2D MBP as it does on my 1.6GHz Atom netbook. I don't run around foaming at the mouth about how irredeemably bad Flash is, though.
    - slantyyz 16y ago
      That's a pretty sweeping statement. I hated Flash on Windows. I happen to hate it more on Mac. I would go so far to say it's a bad format AND a bad port. It's not an either-or situation. Just because Flash sucks less on Windows doesn't mean it's a good format.
- schammy 16y ago
  The whole article really has nothing to do with Flash. Did you even read it? It's about Jobs saying "this is bad for reasons X, Y, and Z", without acknowledging that Apple is guilty of the exact same BS. Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.
akkartik 16y ago
Fake Steve Jobs: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-gizmodo-doors-being-broken-down-etc.html http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-...
youngnh 16y ago
I was wholly expecting his argument to address this quote: If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. with respect to "private api" arguments made here: http://www.marco.org/500743718 http://www.marco.org/500743718
jaimzob 16y ago
What happened to OSNews? I remember it being a pretty good tech news site a while back but now it seems that every day there's another over-written, hyper-ventilating, peanut-gallery-baiting "opinion piece" like this. Good for selling ad impressions I guess.
- mbreese 16y ago
  I stopped reading it a few years ago when the frequency of Thom's rants got too much for me to handle. For example, he was in way over his head when he was trying to describe what his ideal OS of the future would be. I miss the generally geeky articles on alternative operating systems, but ArsTechnica's open source coverage started to pick up about the time that I stopped reading OSNews that I had pretty much forgotten about it until today. Reading this article made me remember why I stopped going there.
- schammy 16y ago
  You didn't actually read the article, did you? It makes a lot of very good and perfectly valid points. Let me also guess - you own a Mac and an iPhone, and are mad because someone is saying bad things about your precious Apple. Correct?
  - jaimzob 16y ago
    My point is that, as you’ve ably demonstrated, there are innumerable sites I can go to to indulge in juvenile tech tribalism. OSNews used to be a cut above these sites but it doesn’t seem to be any more. I think that’s a shame. With regard to the author’s points, they may be sincere but I don’t find them convincing. For example, no matter what you think of the quality of Windows iTunes, the idea was never to commodotise the underlying operating system. A calmer and more convincing argument against Job’s statement would simply be to ask what if Microsoft decided to “preserve their UX” by banning any agent that rendered HTML5?
kqueue 16y ago
umm. I don't think the author knows what hypocrisy means.
GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
YES Thank god. The video codec is 100x worse than flash. At least SWF is open, so you can generate SWF files royalty free from adobe. H264 aint quite that. I tunes sucks, hate it, and no itunes for linux. Hey remember itunes + palm? Yea? We're open my ass. If Apple is so devoted to breaking people free of proprietary crap explain the itunes-palm pre wars.
- rafa8a 16y ago
  They have the right to control their platform. We as consumers can decide to buy or not to buy those products.
hackermom 16y ago
Oh, look, it's Thom Holwerda with a new pair of blinkers on his head covering all possible perspective than what's in front of his own nose. zZz.
navyrain 16y ago
The author really took the microsoft analogy a bit far. "adobe": 10 times. "microsoft" 12 times.
almakdad 16y ago
MS Windows developers aren’t dependent on some third party cross-platform technology to adopt the latest iTunes APIs changes. Whereas, iPhone developers using third party cross-platform tools such as Adobe’s Flash will be at the mercy of Adobe and can only move as fast as it can. http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thoughts-on-flash http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thought...
jsz0 16y ago
I also do not understand how it's hypocritical unless you believe the idiot assumption that one has to commit fully to open or close standards exclusively. Jobs has a much more pragmatic view and I cannot recall any point in which he suggested otherwise. The one thing his open letter makes clear is that Apple is not very interested in advancing other companies closed platforms especially if it undermines their own. That's completely a completely rational approach. I'm not sure why people are so compelled to project these idealogical purity tests on others. It's childish.
hartard 16y ago
Do you like giving hand jobs? Do you like getting hand jobs? That makes you a hypocrite too.
stcredzero 16y ago
Holier than Adobe - this is not a very high bar!
aufreak3 16y ago
I buy Apple's lines on this one. For long, I've been going "Grrrr...." over Flash heating up my macbook pro when run under MacOSX, but running much cooler (as in temperature) under windows on the exact same hardware. So much for cross-platform-ness. ... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads. Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going "Grrrrr..."!
- aufreak3 16y ago
  I don't mean that AK is involved in scratch, but that's the kind of educational stuff that seems to be on his radar.
codingthewheel 16y ago
As much as I dislike Apple's current philosophy, most of Jobs' complaints are on the money.

309 points by mascarenhas 16y ago

While I do think that the Jobs letter is littered with hypocrisy, I don't think comparing iTunes to Flash is a fair analogy. One is a single self contained application, and the other is a framework/runtime.

pohl 16y ago

I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. That makes no sense. I could see how it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so. But it is not hypocrisy to enforce different rules for your own platform product than those for a competitors. There are no moral claims involved here.

crad 16y ago
Right, not using all the tools available in an OS is quite different than not being able to do so because of the development environment.
- pohl 16y ago
  See...in the subtext of your post, there is the ghost of a moral claim. † So now we're getting close to the requirements for hypocrisy. Now you would just need to create a closed platform and ship it. † One that Jobs did not make, and that I do not agree with — I think any platform can make its own rules, and game consoles have set the precedent for the more closed model.
Confusion 16y ago
It's so hard to grasp that the author even uses 'hypercritical' as an adjective to denote an instance of hypocrisy.
- mascarenhas 16y ago
  This was obviously a typo to me, I just skipped it and kept reading. By now several other comments here have shown that the Jobs' letter is indeed hypocritical by the accepted definitions of the term. I will even link another one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocrisy.
andreyf 16y ago
I strongly disagree with the author, but I grasp his point of view. Let me try to explain it. There exists an ideology of "open is always better than closed": open source is better than closed source, open formats are better than proprietary formats, etc. When Jobs talks about WebKit/SquirrelFish being open source implementations of open standards, he is, intentionally or not, appealing to that audience. But obviously, Steve doesn't believe that open is always better than closed: for example, in the iPhone OS, in the AppStore, and in the H.264 video formats, he's relying on closed and proprietary systems for practical benefit. To those, like RMS, who want the open/closed heuristic used globally and without considering any other variables, this is hypocritical - you say you support openness in one area, but not another. To the people that care about end-user experience more than open/closed systems, such hypocrisy is just common sense. Personally, I think we should strive for cooperation between the "pure morality" point of view of Stallman, and from the "practical morality" point of view of industry. I've been both a paying member of the FSF and a big fan of the Apple's ecosystem of products since high school: the two are free to pursue their own goals independently, and work together to the fullest extent that shareholder interests align with open-source morality. A great example such a beautifully aligned interest is Google's rumored opening of the VP8 codec - it will both save Google oodles of bandwidth and storage in the long-run, and be great step for the open ecosystem. It's also important to remember, however, that the reason On2 was able to get investors to pay for the development of VP8 is because of the IP protections they received. Without those, Google would have had to fund/organize/oversee such development in-house instead of letting a free market of startups and investors do a lot of the managing/evaluating/choosing for them.
- vorador 16y ago
  I'm not sure to get your point : for instance, why a closed-source iphoneOS would be better than an open one ?
- doki_pen 16y ago
  Jobs implies something when he says that he thinks the web "should" be open. He doesn't say it's better for Apple if it's open. Anyway, what is the point? Shouldn't we all have our own self interest in mind and not Apple's? What do I care if it benefits Apple if it doesn't benefit me? The argument should be about whether we should accept what is happening lying down, or if we should try to resist it. Just because it makes sense for Apple to behave this way, doesn't mean that we should accept it. Edit: It has nothing to do with morality. It's my own vested self interest that makes me wary of Apple. To bring up morality is a way of minimizing my views.
acg 16y ago
Hypocrisy is not reserved for moral claims. Jobs could be making a virtue out of openness (I'm not sure he is) or saying one thing in public and acting differently in private. Both of which, without moral claims, could cause him to be a hypocrite. Jobs could be called a hypocrite in two different senses depending on how cynical you are.
- pohl 16y ago
  I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do. It's not enough, for example, for me to wax eloquent about how much I love the color green while I'm wearing a purple shirt. It is possible, after all, to love both open models and closed models in different contexts.
  - telemachos 16y ago
    I'll concede that the claim does not need to be moral, but it should, at least, be a claim about what ought to be or what one ought to do. But the author meets this standard. For example, he points out that Jobs says, in effect, that Adobe should have moved their Carbon apps to Cocoa, even though Apple hasn't done so in some cases.
    - pohl 16y ago
      Note that you have to use the weasel-phrase "in effect" to put words in the mouth of Jobs and claim that "the author meets this standard". If you're so certain he's met the standard, provide an actual quotation rather than a straw man. Jobs made no such statement. Rather, he observed that Adobe was very slow in passing Apple's platform improvements on to its customers, and the implication here is that it would be unwise for Apple to allow middleware to put Apple in a position where Adobe could do the same thing again for thousands of apps. But he made no claim about what Adobe ought to have done, or should have done. Rather, he gave a reason for the policy decisions that Apple has made.
      - 16y ago
_pius 16y ago
I wish I knew why the concept of hypocrisy is so difficult to grasp that people are prone to apply it incorrectly. Maybe people just don't understand when someone is making a moral statement, and when someone isn't. Indeed, "tu quoque" fail abounds. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
- cageface 16y ago
  Merriam Webster defines hypocrisy thus: "feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially : the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion" I'd say Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software fits the bill perfectly. Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time.
  - pohl 16y ago
    Apple's lambasting of Adobe for failing to provide open & reliable cross-platform software I think a quotation to support your interpretation above would be helpful, because it's not at all what I read in "Thoughts on Flash" today. That is, I did not get the impression that Apple thought Adobe ought to deliver anything open. They were merely pointing out that it is not — and that this does not meet Apple's vision for what they want to support within Mobile Safari. In fact, he went so far as to concede that "Apple has many proprietary products too."
  - _pius 16y ago
    Steve's critique of Flash can be both accurate and hypocritical at the same time. Great point, actually.
orangecat 16y ago
The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest And Mac apps. iTunes and Final Cut Pro are still 32-bit Carbon, with no indication of that changing anytime soon.
- carussell 16y ago
  Maybe it's wrong of me to be pointing out votes, but it really irks me that the original comment is at 46 as of this writing, while yours is at 4. So I want to comment in favor of stressing the above comments, hard. Considering a substantial discussion of the semantics of the word "hypocrisy" followed, with some people taking one side, and some the other, let's make a correction to the original presumption so that even those who didn't believe it to be hypocritical can come into agreement. "The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform." is false. The claim is that since Apple ships major OS X apps that don't use Cocoa, it's hypocrisy to attack Adobe on those grounds. Edit: Actually Jobs's words chide Adobe as "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X", so the debate might be a little bit more than moot. I still think it's entirely fair, though, to ask of Apple in the same vein, "Hey, why so late for you guys to fully adopt Mac OS X?"
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- glhaynes 16y ago
  The very fact that those are some of the things that have been criticized the most (the list would have had to have included Finder until a few months ago!) and with many cries to have them converted to Cocoa may reveal hypocrisy but it also proves Jobs' point: cross-platform, least-common-denominator stuff almost never provides the level of enjoyment that native, non-legacy stuff does. Many think the web has proven that cross-platform apps are fine. It hasn't — the web is its own platform.
  - zmmmmm 16y ago
Nwallins 16y ago
Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates? I see a normative claim: Software systems should do X, Y, and Z Software systems that do not meet the norm are penalized or disallowed by Apple's platform(s). However, Apple's own software does not meet this norm either, even on Apple's own platform. It sure seems like hypocrisy to me, even if it is defensible.
- randallsquared 16y ago
  Is it not hypocritical to hold others to higher standards than one demonstrates? I would say it's hypocritical to hold those of a class including yourself to standards which you do not meet. That is, it's not hypocritical (however blameworthy it may or may not be) to say, "Everyone but me should do X, while I should do Y," but it is to say "Everyone should do X" while actually doing Y. You can see Jobs trying to avoid hypocrisy in the original post by asserting that web standards should be open, while other software systems have no such obligation.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- demallien 16y ago
  You're talking about the adoption of Cocoa and the fact that iTunes still uses Carbon? It's not really a fair accusation. I think Apple would very much like to be able to rewrite iTunes in Cocoa, but they have a problem - it's a cross-platform application. As a result they have chosen to use an API on the Mac that most closely resembles an API available on Windows. They know that iTunes is not exploiting the features available on both platforms to their fullest - perhaps painfully so. It is precisely this type of experience which makes them wish to avoid cross-platform development on their new platform. I mean Apple really does care about the user experience, more so than any other company that I can think of. And yet even they have not managed to put together a good user experience for their cross-platform app. On the Mac it isn't hooked up to all of the Cocoa hotness, and on the PC, well, the less said, the better. It is Apple's firsthand experience with the problems you can have during cross-platform development that is informing their decision to strongly discourage such development on the iPhone platform.
telemachos 16y ago
You seem to believe that 'hypocrisy' (and related words, I assume) can only apply to moral claims. That isn't true to the best of my knowledge, and a check of a handful of good dictionaries (online and paper) confirms this. Here's one link, for example: http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1+0&dict=A http://dictionaries.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=hypocrisy*1... Although the charge of hypocrisy often comes up in moral contexts, that isn't a requirement.
- dasil003 16y ago
  The older I get the more convinced I am that it's possible to define anyone as a hypocrite simply by repeatedly moving to a higher abstraction until you find a layer where what someone says and what they do are not in sync, and then you can righteously declare "hypocrite!", even though the actual conflict was generated by creative semantics (which all higher thought is). Therefore in order for a hypocrisy to be a useful word I think it needs a more rigorous connotation. I'm not saying the moral angle is the correct one, but I certainly think that Jobs' letter is far from any reasonably useful definition hypocrisy.
  - telemachos 16y ago
    You're asking for a redefinition or sharpening of a word that is often used in a sloppy way. That's fine - and potentially very useful. But my point was more limited: the parent poster writes as though vast numbers of people don't understand the simple concept of hypocrisy. That might be fine, too, except that it's his definition of 'hypocrisy' that is non-standard.
VictorHo 16y ago
From dictionary.com: hy·poc·ri·sy [hi-pok-ruh-see] –noun,plural-sies. 1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess. 2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude. 3. an act or instance of hypocrisy. I don't see how the author misuses the word "hypocrisy" at all. It appears to me that his case relates to #2 above - Jobs pretends to hold an attitude promoting open standards etc. when that is not the real motivation behind his actions at all.
- KirinDave 16y ago
  That sort of presupposes a tone of sanctimony that I really don't get from the letter. I don't think Apple is trying to argue they're doing some kind of overall good, they've written a letter about how Flash conflicts with their strategic vision for their platform. What specific parts do you think suggest feigned virtue? The parts where he claims to want a better environment for developers? That's the only place where I think you might have a toehold. It must sort of suck to be Apple community relations right now. If you act according to your business plan, you get railed at for being imperious and arbitrary. If you then explain that business plan and your rationale, people immediately see it's not all nobility and grace and get pissed. The brand perception and loyalty that Apple has spent so much time building can certainly be a double-edged sword.
- nosnih 16y ago
  What many people seem to be missing or ignoring is that he is primarily talking about Flash content on websites. Jobs said all standards pertaining to the web should be open, not all software. He admits that they have proprietary systems for native apps. Apple believes that browsing the web should not require a proprietary plugin. I don't see any hypocrisy in that.
boredguy8 16y ago
Neal Stephenson, "Diamond Age" "You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others--after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?" ... "Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour--you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy. ... "We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception--he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing." "That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." "Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved--the missteps we make along the way--are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power." All three men were quiet for a few moments, chewing mouthfuls of beer or smoke, pondering the matter. (http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_greatest_luxury/ http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/03/21/hypocrisy_is_the_gre...)
- donaq 16y ago
  Those are some very interesting quotes. Now, the question is, which definition of hypocrisy applies to Jobs?
binspace 16y ago
Steve Jobs is trumpeting open standards for the web yet supporting closed standards, hence the hypocrisy.
CamperBob 16y ago
The claim here appears to be that since Apple ships Windows apps that don't use that platform to its fullest, Jobs cannot claim that least-common-denominator middleware is unhealthy for a platform. There were many good points in the article, and that's only one of them. Thoughts on the others, particularly the 'openness' of H.264 or lack thereof?
zzleeper 16y ago
Isn't it hypocrisy to criticize someone for doing the very same thing you are doing? (ie, taking ages to adopt cocoa fully). It's even worst if you are supposed to be leading by example, as cocoa is apple's own design.

mclin 16y ago

iTunes for Windows is by far one of the worst pieces of (major) Windows software you can possibly think of. I used to think Apple did this on purpose to spite windows users, but then I got a mac and discovered iTunes sucks on OSX too. Damn you beach ball!

mr_justin 16y ago
Really? I leave mine running for weeks on end with no issues. I try to keep it up to date but usually let the updates stew for a month before upgrading. iTunes is indispensable software for me, and I don't own an iPhone, iPad, iPod or any of that. Nor do I use it for purchasing music. Strictly as a music organizer/player, I think it is fantastic and integrates perfectly with the operating system. That being said, the last time I used iTunes on Windows it was about as enjoybable as waiting for a Java Applet to load up.
- mclin 16y ago
  I don't mean it crashes. I just hate how unresponsive it is. It gives me the beachball anytime I do anything involving I/O (syncing, adding songs, retrieving album art, calculating gapless bullshit). That's bad UI programming. Do your I/O in a background thread. I know it's doing it on the GUI thread because I'll command-tab to it and it won't redraw, which of course prevents me from cancelling out of whatever task-I-didn't-ask-for it's doing. This, btw, is the same behaviour I hated on windows.
  - Terretta 16y ago
    Out of curiosity, is your library on an external disk that sleeps? Mine was, and it seemed to hang while waiting for the disk to spin up. I moved it to an always on disk, and the hangs stopped.
- jws 16y ago
  I was just counting seconds the other day (iTunes, modern x86 mac, 40k songs or so) Managing iPhone, changing tabs, 5 seconds of beachball. Go to iTunes store, 23 seconds of frozen app. Trying to see if I have new podcasts while downloading music: 12 seconds of beachball. If you EVER see a beachball on a Mac then either your hardware is failing or your application's programmer has failed. Your programmer should NEVER do an operation that can block and make the user interface unresponsive in the user interface thread. Ever. Beachball aside, why does it take 100 billion cpu clock cycles to switch from one tab to another?

aneth 16y ago

The only people I know defending Adobe and Flash are Flash developers and Adobe itself. Everybody else tolerates Flash begrudgingly. I miss a few flash games here and there on my iPhone. Beyond that, good riddance. Flash is the RealPlayer of the decade.

tdfx 16y ago
I am so glad you used that metaphor.
CoryMathews 16y ago
I personally hate developing in flash and I hate flash websites. However I enjoy flash videos and flash games. I don't want someone telling me I can no longer play these games.
apphacker 16y ago
I started using Amazon Video which uses flash. I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. I doubt Amazon would make this a direct video since Flash permits some form of rights management for content owners. If it were just a video I could download it and distribute it how I wanted. Which while ultimately is a nice idea but studios would just then not permit things like Amazon Video and so I like that Flash has enabled me to enjoy the content I want the way I can.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  I like to be able to view movies and videos I've purchased where ever I am on whatever computer I am, and as of right now that's only possible with flash. Silverlight?
MichaelGG 16y ago
Defending Flash overall or for iPhone? I hate every Adobe product except Photoshop, yet I still am upset with Apple's decision on blocking other runtimes and forcing C.
16y ago

S_A_P 16y ago

I see some of his points, but he is missing the bigger point. (And Steve's letter actually fails here too) They want to keep flash out of the mobile device space, so arguing about creating crappy desktop apps is a red herring.

archgrove 16y ago

The author openly conceeds the points that consumers will actually care about - performance, security, and proprietary nature. It's hard to claim that it's a "marketing trick to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers" when you agree with large tracts of the author's argument. Their main point, that he's somehow a hypocrite because Apple haven't used the latest tech for everything, entirely misses the point he's making - Putting a 3rd party layer between your platform and developers can cause a lag in new features being used. He then states he's mostly worried that Adobe would have really amplified this lag, as "Adobe has been painfully slow to adopt enhancements to Apple’s platforms". He doesn't say it's bad that they've been this slow, just that they are this slow. If it takes them 10 years to adopt Cocoa, why would anything in iPhone 4.0 turn up in Flash till 2015? His claim is that middleware lag is a bad thing is not weakened by iTunes for Windows being crappy - if anything, it's strengthened. He makes his position very clear - "we sell more devices because we have the best apps", and feels they get the best apps without middleware. There's nothing inconsistent with this position, whilst still taking advantage of other platforms lack of restrictions. I'm not even going to deal with the authors claim that h.264 is as proprietary as Flash: A standard that was developed by a committee, in the open, with many implementations and a licensing scheme for anyone, versus a commercial closed product developed by a single company and no competitive implementations? Sure, there's no difference at all there.

nkassis 16y ago
I think he mostly argues about the fact that Jobs stated Flash not being and open standard as a reason not to support it. I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company and as the author points out, they've mostly stated this for marketing purposes while not fully embracing the idea.
- rimantas 16y ago
  I hope we can all agree that Apple has never really been an open standards company We cannot. I strongly disagree. At least in the web space there is a lot of innovation comming from or strongly supported by Apple.

tlrobinson 16y ago

iTunes sucking on Windows doesn't make them hypocrites, it helps prove their point. I'm sure Apple would rather not have to release a Windows version of iTunes, but it's necessary to sell more iPods.

CoryMathews 16y ago
iTunes sucks on windows because it does not take advantage of windows. If windows was the iPhone and iTunes was an app it would have been banned a long time ago.
- tlrobinson 16y ago
  Exactly. Replace "iTunes sucks on Windows" with "Flash suck on iPhone" and "Windows" with "iPhone SDK" and you're making his argument for him. Not that I agree with their policies, but this article's arguments aren't very good.
  - boucher 16y ago
    It's an incredibly simple claim. Apple is engaging in hypocritical policies. Apple forbids actions on its own platform that Apple uses to make money and gain market share on other platforms. I don't see how you can interpret this any other way.
    - tlrobinson 16y ago
      See the top comment in this thread by pohl: "it would be hypocrisy if Microsoft forbade middleware and Apple complained about whether or not it was right for Microsoft to do so."
    - chc 16y ago
      That isn't hypocrisy. Jobs isn't saying he believes that people must never create cross-platform apps — he's just saying that they suck (as this author acknowledges Apple's cross-platform apps do) and thus he doesn't want them on his system. It's like the owner of McDonalds not wanting to take his wife to a McDonalds for their anniversary — he's not saying nobody should eat there, just acknowledging that it's rather low-class for the given situation.

mattmiller 16y ago

I don't understand the big deal. Do people really love developing in flash that much? Is the flash development community really this big? I have a feeling that a lot of people are jumping on the bandwagon because it gets attention. It is really weird, before this everyone hated flash. It was pretty well accepted as a necessary evil that we all wished we could do without (at least that is the vibe I got). We are now almost able to do without it, and 1 OS maker is trying to push that trend. The truth is that flash kinda sucks, and it makes the OS look bad, and that is bad for Apple.

tomlin 16y ago
Windows users don't hate Flash nearly as much as OSX users. Performance plays a role, no doubt.
- commandar 16y ago
  Mac users seem incapable of distinguishing between a bad format and a bad port. Flash on OS X is the latter; Flash runs about the same on my 2.16GHz C2D MBP as it does on my 1.6GHz Atom netbook. I don't run around foaming at the mouth about how irredeemably bad Flash is, though.
  - slantyyz 16y ago
    That's a pretty sweeping statement. I hated Flash on Windows. I happen to hate it more on Mac. I would go so far to say it's a bad format AND a bad port. It's not an either-or situation. Just because Flash sucks less on Windows doesn't mean it's a good format.
schammy 16y ago
The whole article really has nothing to do with Flash. Did you even read it? It's about Jobs saying "this is bad for reasons X, Y, and Z", without acknowledging that Apple is guilty of the exact same BS. Example - he basically says Adobe sucks because they just finally got around to releasing a full "Cocoa" binary for CS5. And yet Apple has the same problems. The Finder was Carbon until Snow Leopard was released, less than a year ago. And iTunes, arguably their biggest app, is still Carbon. Yet somehow because Adobe still had Carbon apps as of a few weeks ago, they are evil.

akkartik 16y ago

Fake Steve Jobs: http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-gizmodo-doors-being-broken-down-etc.html http://www.fakesteve.net/2010/04/please-stop-thinking-about-...

youngnh 16y ago

I was wholly expecting his argument to address this quote: If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. with respect to "private api" arguments made here: http://www.marco.org/500743718 http://www.marco.org/500743718

jaimzob 16y ago

What happened to OSNews? I remember it being a pretty good tech news site a while back but now it seems that every day there's another over-written, hyper-ventilating, peanut-gallery-baiting "opinion piece" like this. Good for selling ad impressions I guess.

mbreese 16y ago
I stopped reading it a few years ago when the frequency of Thom's rants got too much for me to handle. For example, he was in way over his head when he was trying to describe what his ideal OS of the future would be. I miss the generally geeky articles on alternative operating systems, but ArsTechnica's open source coverage started to pick up about the time that I stopped reading OSNews that I had pretty much forgotten about it until today. Reading this article made me remember why I stopped going there.
schammy 16y ago
You didn't actually read the article, did you? It makes a lot of very good and perfectly valid points. Let me also guess - you own a Mac and an iPhone, and are mad because someone is saying bad things about your precious Apple. Correct?
- jaimzob 16y ago
  My point is that, as you’ve ably demonstrated, there are innumerable sites I can go to to indulge in juvenile tech tribalism. OSNews used to be a cut above these sites but it doesn’t seem to be any more. I think that’s a shame. With regard to the author’s points, they may be sincere but I don’t find them convincing. For example, no matter what you think of the quality of Windows iTunes, the idea was never to commodotise the underlying operating system. A calmer and more convincing argument against Job’s statement would simply be to ask what if Microsoft decided to “preserve their UX” by banning any agent that rendered HTML5?

kqueue 16y ago

umm. I don't think the author knows what hypocrisy means.

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago

YES Thank god. The video codec is 100x worse than flash. At least SWF is open, so you can generate SWF files royalty free from adobe. H264 aint quite that. I tunes sucks, hate it, and no itunes for linux. Hey remember itunes + palm? Yea? We're open my ass. If Apple is so devoted to breaking people free of proprietary crap explain the itunes-palm pre wars.

rafa8a 16y ago
They have the right to control their platform. We as consumers can decide to buy or not to buy those products.

hackermom 16y ago

Oh, look, it's Thom Holwerda with a new pair of blinkers on his head covering all possible perspective than what's in front of his own nose. zZz.

navyrain 16y ago

The author really took the microsoft analogy a bit far. "adobe": 10 times. "microsoft" 12 times.

almakdad 16y ago

MS Windows developers aren’t dependent on some third party cross-platform technology to adopt the latest iTunes APIs changes. Whereas, iPhone developers using third party cross-platform tools such as Adobe’s Flash will be at the mercy of Adobe and can only move as fast as it can. http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thoughts-on-flash http://malnakari.tumblr.com/post/559162861/the-other-thought...

jsz0 16y ago

I also do not understand how it's hypocritical unless you believe the idiot assumption that one has to commit fully to open or close standards exclusively. Jobs has a much more pragmatic view and I cannot recall any point in which he suggested otherwise. The one thing his open letter makes clear is that Apple is not very interested in advancing other companies closed platforms especially if it undermines their own. That's completely a completely rational approach. I'm not sure why people are so compelled to project these idealogical purity tests on others. It's childish.

hartard 16y ago

Do you like giving hand jobs? Do you like getting hand jobs? That makes you a hypocrite too.

stcredzero 16y ago

Holier than Adobe - this is not a very high bar!

aufreak3 16y ago

I buy Apple's lines on this one. For long, I've been going "Grrrr...." over Flash heating up my macbook pro when run under MacOSX, but running much cooler (as in temperature) under windows on the exact same hardware. So much for cross-platform-ness. ... and though Apple's comments do mention Adobe taking its time to cocoa-ize its apps, this is clearly about the iPod Touches and iPhones and iPads. Its sad, however, that in order to do this, Apple has forbidden the entire category of runtimes - including Scratch. Now Alan Kay might be the one going "Grrrrr..."!

aufreak3 16y ago
I don't mean that AK is involved in scratch, but that's the kind of educational stuff that seems to be on his radar.

codingthewheel 16y ago

As much as I dislike Apple's current philosophy, most of Jobs' complaints are on the money.