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> It would have been trivial for Apple at that point to hire a team or two to shoehorn a so-so version of Flash onto their devices. (This seemed like an even bi

by dvt 6y ago

> It would have been trivial for Apple at that point to hire a team or two to shoehorn a so-so version of Flash onto their devices. (This seemed like an even bigger mistake on the iPad which had just launched). But he is clear and adamant. They are going to make calls they believe are best to shape great products. I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. Apple had always wanted to keep a very tight control of any ecosystem they inhabited. From their decision to stick with PowerPC as long as they did, to their zoo of Apple-specific dongles, to the Apple Store and beyond. Steve Jobs was a genius in understanding that an ecosystem is orders of magnitudes more valuable if you, as an entity, control it. Valve is another company that did the same thing. > It takes courage to look at a feature that lots of people “want” and make the call to exclude it. This is a lot easier to do when you control the ecosystem. It's not like someone could migrate to using a Samsung-made iPad or something. > In a moment of self-deprecation/levity he quips “We never saw ourselves as in a platform war with Microsoft and maybe that’s why we lost”. It’s a quick flash of him taking himself less-seriously and it’s disarming. This is absolutely untrue, and Jobs is playing the crowd. Not only did Apple definitely see themselves in a platform war, they doubled-down on this with the iPhone. It was always about platforms. Jobs just happened to lose the first time, but he decidedly won the second. > Jobs: We are about making better products, and what I love about the consumer market that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that: we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it and every person votes for themselves. They go yes or no, and if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow. You know that’s how it works. It’s really simple. Whereas with the enterprise market, it’s not so simple, the people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for ppl and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not. Not sure exactly how forthright Jobs is here, but -- honest or not -- man, I just want to say this is an incredible answer and motivates me to get off my ass and go build something :)

vmception 6y ago
Yes, I'm not sure it was intentional but your post could be balanced by pointing out the advantages for the consumer when there is ecosystem control and vertical integration. Apple took a calculated and different approach than other mobile entrants and it has paid off. When you look at Android, it has similarities to the Mac vs PC dichotomy except much worse, where the OS provider doesn't care what happens, the OEM manufacturer doesn't care what happens, and a few other players don't care what happens either (ISP, open source community). Only Google and Samsung attempt at caring, and even then it is a disaster as there is no way to getHuman().
jjtheblunt 6y ago
Internal discussions in Apple, in the hardware division where I was, were obsessed with the Flash runtime (and apps runnning on it) devouring battery. It's worth remembering that, at the time, the iPhone was quite new and establishing a foothold in the cellular product ecosystem, not the app ecosystem, wasn't guaranteed, and as such was very self conscious about battery life compared to things like a Treo.
- majormajor 6y ago
  I ran Flash (for ESPN streaming) on a 2010 HTC and yeah, it chewed through battery pretty quickly. It was also a pretty shitty user experience, forcing inflexible web-optimized flash into the phone form factor. Those problems could've been overcome, but it's definitely not like Flash on day 1 would've been good for any users.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    2010 was four years after the iPhone.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      Well, three, but who's counting. And yeah: so imagine how bad it would've been then, if it still sucked that bad on 2010 smartphones.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      So? It's not like Flash was better 4 years before. If anything, it was much crappier, without 4 years of any kind of optimization for mobile use.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        That’s kind of my point. Everyone claims that Apple alone stopped Flash from being on the iPhone. But, Adobe could barely get it running on a 2010 era Android phone that had a 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM. How would they get it running on a 2007 era iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB RAM?
ozten 6y ago
The #1 source of crashes for Firefox 4 was Flash. That is why Mozilla prioritized getting rid of it once HTML5 was capable of most of the use cases. Chrome similarly replaced Adobe's buggy Flash plugin with a new implementation baked into the browser, to address these concerns. I think iOS did the right thing for users here.
npunt 6y ago
> I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. The original iPhone was super resource constrained (battery, ram, cpu) which required rethinking how apps were handled, including that they could be killed anytime. This was very much against conventional wisdom at the time. Apps (and websites) also needed significant redesign to fit within the touch UX paradigm. Flash's fate was likely first and foremost a byproduct of these constraints and the changes they necessitated. While I agree control always mattered to Jobs & Apple, so too did user expectations, which at the time meant flash on web. My strong suspicion is engineering realities (resources) and user experience practicalities (need for flash to adapt to mobile UX) drove the decision, which was then easier to justify from the perspective of control.
moogleii 6y ago
> I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. This is doubtful. From what I recall of that era, Flash was a memory hog, and sometimes a CPU hog. Why is my tab/browser hanging? Flash. Also, at the time of the Flash ban, Jobs pushed HTML5, H.264, and native as alternatives (only the latter really gives control).
- enraged_camel 6y ago
  >> Flash was a memory hog, and sometimes a CPU hog. It was also a complete and total mess from a security perspective.
scarface74 6y ago
The truth is that Adobe claimed that they could get Flash running well on the original iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128Mb RAM. When Adobe did finally get it to run on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. An iPhone didn’t come out with those specs until 2011. The original iPad only had 256MB of RAM and couldn’t even run Safari without crashing by 2011 with iOS 5. It would have never run Flash.
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Just to complement your answer, "get it to run" doesn't mean "run smoothly" meant more like "barely running" I remember the "Android Flash" demos, they were atrocious
setpatchaddress 6y ago
By projecting your perception of the present onto past events, you're distorting the historical context. Remember that the original answer to native third-party apps was "HTML5 websites are good enough." Anyone who worked with him will tell you that all of the statements you've quoted are forthright. Control is a byproduct.
coldtea 6y ago
>> It takes courage to look at a feature that lots of people “want” and make the call to exclude it. This is a lot easier to do when you control the ecosystem. It's not like someone could migrate to using a Samsung-made iPad or something. No, but they could always not get an iPad. There's no control there, and most "walled garden" talk preventing users to switch is BS. With so many fundamental apps being subscription (Office, Creative suite, etc), so many others free (Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Zoom, etc.) and tons of them on the web (from Gmail to Basecamp), plus lots of FOSS for us geeks, there's little thing keeping someone to one platform if they'd rather be on another. Even music and video consumption is now subscription based for the big majority, and their accounts work in all Apple/Google's/PC ecosystems.
AnonC 6y ago
> I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. It sounds like you weren’t following tech news around that time. The decision about Flash may have had some elements about control, but it was largely about avoiding an unreliable, crashing, battery sucking and insecure piece of software. When Steve Jobs wrote his open letter “Thoughts on Flash”, [1] there was a lot of criticism on Apple’s decision and predictions of Android wiping out Apple completely because Android still supported Flash. But people did come around to see that Apple was right about Flash and that it wasn’t something that was good enough to be included on mobile. Eventually, Adobe was forced to stop development on it (to the extent it was spending time but still not making it better on stability, security and energy consumption). [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple...
- xorcist 6y ago
  Apple never intended to allow any VM to run on the iPhone. A hypothetical flash runtime, that actually worked well on mobile, would allow Adobe to run a application distribution platform on top of iOS, and threaten Apple's 30% cut. They've been forced to relent on that hard line a few times, but Apple still won't allow Firefox on iOS for this reason, and they probably never will. The fact that flash was absolute crap helped, but didn't change anything.
michaelbrave 6y ago
I had always thought Job's attitude toward flash wasn't about control but was an actual vindictive strike against Adobe for not having his back when he needed them.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Details please?
  - michaelbrave 6y ago
    When NeXT got acquired by Apple and Steve went back to Apple he tried to get Adobe to make premier for the new Mac-OS. Since Apple hadn't been profitable for a while Adobe declined, so Apple made a deal with Macromedia to which became Final Cut. It's known that he held grudges and would base deals on how able he was to make demands or phone calls and it seems to be the case here too even if it was the right call technologically. This was related https://bgr.com/2016/12/12/steve-jobs-iphone-adobe-flash-testing/ https://bgr.com/2016/12/12/steve-jobs-iphone-adobe-flash-tes...
jimbokun 6y ago
> It was always about platforms. Jobs just happened to lose the first time, but he decidedly won the second. A different way of phrasing it: Apple didn't realize they were in a platform war with the Mac, which is why they lost, and Jobs made sure they didn't repeat that mistake with the iPhone.

by dvt 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

Yes, I'm not sure it was intentional but your post could be balanced by pointing out the advantages for the consumer when there is ecosystem control and vertical integration. Apple took a calculated and different approach than other mobile entrants and it has paid off. When you look at Android, it has similarities to the Mac vs PC dichotomy except much worse, where the OS provider doesn't care what happens, the OEM manufacturer doesn't care what happens, and a few other players don't care what happens either (ISP, open source community). Only Google and Samsung attempt at caring, and even then it is a disaster as there is no way to getHuman().

jjtheblunt 6y ago

Internal discussions in Apple, in the hardware division where I was, were obsessed with the Flash runtime (and apps runnning on it) devouring battery. It's worth remembering that, at the time, the iPhone was quite new and establishing a foothold in the cellular product ecosystem, not the app ecosystem, wasn't guaranteed, and as such was very self conscious about battery life compared to things like a Treo.

majormajor 6y ago
I ran Flash (for ESPN streaming) on a 2010 HTC and yeah, it chewed through battery pretty quickly. It was also a pretty shitty user experience, forcing inflexible web-optimized flash into the phone form factor. Those problems could've been overcome, but it's definitely not like Flash on day 1 would've been good for any users.
- scarface74 6y ago
  2010 was four years after the iPhone.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    Well, three, but who's counting. And yeah: so imagine how bad it would've been then, if it still sucked that bad on 2010 smartphones.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    So? It's not like Flash was better 4 years before. If anything, it was much crappier, without 4 years of any kind of optimization for mobile use.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      That’s kind of my point. Everyone claims that Apple alone stopped Flash from being on the iPhone. But, Adobe could barely get it running on a 2010 era Android phone that had a 1GHz processor and 1GB RAM. How would they get it running on a 2007 era iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB RAM?

ozten 6y ago

The #1 source of crashes for Firefox 4 was Flash. That is why Mozilla prioritized getting rid of it once HTML5 was capable of most of the use cases. Chrome similarly replaced Adobe's buggy Flash plugin with a new implementation baked into the browser, to address these concerns. I think iOS did the right thing for users here.

npunt 6y ago

> I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. The original iPhone was super resource constrained (battery, ram, cpu) which required rethinking how apps were handled, including that they could be killed anytime. This was very much against conventional wisdom at the time. Apps (and websites) also needed significant redesign to fit within the touch UX paradigm. Flash's fate was likely first and foremost a byproduct of these constraints and the changes they necessitated. While I agree control always mattered to Jobs & Apple, so too did user expectations, which at the time meant flash on web. My strong suspicion is engineering realities (resources) and user experience practicalities (need for flash to adapt to mobile UX) drove the decision, which was then easier to justify from the perspective of control.

moogleii 6y ago

> I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. This is doubtful. From what I recall of that era, Flash was a memory hog, and sometimes a CPU hog. Why is my tab/browser hanging? Flash. Also, at the time of the Flash ban, Jobs pushed HTML5, H.264, and native as alternatives (only the latter really gives control).

enraged_camel 6y ago
>> Flash was a memory hog, and sometimes a CPU hog. It was also a complete and total mess from a security perspective.

scarface74 6y ago

The truth is that Adobe claimed that they could get Flash running well on the original iPhone that had a 400Mhz processor and 128Mb RAM. When Adobe did finally get it to run on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. An iPhone didn’t come out with those specs until 2011. The original iPad only had 256MB of RAM and couldn’t even run Safari without crashing by 2011 with iOS 5. It would have never run Flash.

raverbashing 6y ago
Just to complement your answer, "get it to run" doesn't mean "run smoothly" meant more like "barely running" I remember the "Android Flash" demos, they were atrocious

setpatchaddress 6y ago

By projecting your perception of the present onto past events, you're distorting the historical context. Remember that the original answer to native third-party apps was "HTML5 websites are good enough." Anyone who worked with him will tell you that all of the statements you've quoted are forthright. Control is a byproduct.

coldtea 6y ago

>> It takes courage to look at a feature that lots of people “want” and make the call to exclude it. This is a lot easier to do when you control the ecosystem. It's not like someone could migrate to using a Samsung-made iPad or something. No, but they could always not get an iPad. There's no control there, and most "walled garden" talk preventing users to switch is BS. With so many fundamental apps being subscription (Office, Creative suite, etc), so many others free (Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Zoom, etc.) and tons of them on the web (from Gmail to Basecamp), plus lots of FOSS for us geeks, there's little thing keeping someone to one platform if they'd rather be on another. Even music and video consumption is now subscription based for the big majority, and their accounts work in all Apple/Google's/PC ecosystems.

AnonC 6y ago

> I don't really think the Flash decision had anything to do with "better products," and simply ecosystem control. It sounds like you weren’t following tech news around that time. The decision about Flash may have had some elements about control, but it was largely about avoiding an unreliable, crashing, battery sucking and insecure piece of software. When Steve Jobs wrote his open letter “Thoughts on Flash”, [1] there was a lot of criticism on Apple’s decision and predictions of Android wiping out Apple completely because Android still supported Flash. But people did come around to see that Apple was right about Flash and that it wasn’t something that was good enough to be included on mobile. Eventually, Adobe was forced to stop development on it (to the extent it was spending time but still not making it better on stability, security and energy consumption). [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple...

xorcist 6y ago
Apple never intended to allow any VM to run on the iPhone. A hypothetical flash runtime, that actually worked well on mobile, would allow Adobe to run a application distribution platform on top of iOS, and threaten Apple's 30% cut. They've been forced to relent on that hard line a few times, but Apple still won't allow Firefox on iOS for this reason, and they probably never will. The fact that flash was absolute crap helped, but didn't change anything.

michaelbrave 6y ago

I had always thought Job's attitude toward flash wasn't about control but was an actual vindictive strike against Adobe for not having his back when he needed them.

Stratoscope 6y ago
Details please?
- michaelbrave 6y ago
  When NeXT got acquired by Apple and Steve went back to Apple he tried to get Adobe to make premier for the new Mac-OS. Since Apple hadn't been profitable for a while Adobe declined, so Apple made a deal with Macromedia to which became Final Cut. It's known that he held grudges and would base deals on how able he was to make demands or phone calls and it seems to be the case here too even if it was the right call technologically. This was related https://bgr.com/2016/12/12/steve-jobs-iphone-adobe-flash-testing/ https://bgr.com/2016/12/12/steve-jobs-iphone-adobe-flash-tes...

jimbokun 6y ago

> It was always about platforms. Jobs just happened to lose the first time, but he decidedly won the second. A different way of phrasing it: Apple didn't realize they were in a platform war with the Mac, which is why they lost, and Jobs made sure they didn't repeat that mistake with the iPhone.