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Steve hated industry standards. The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. Every

Steve hated industry standards. The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. Every iphone user was reminded daily about how kneecapped it is when they can't pull up the web site for the restaursnt to check hours or call up for a reservation. That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it. And so he said flash is bad and html5 and pwa is the better way to do what flash does. Since then they only say anything even slightly similar only as a defense against monopoly charges about native apps "what? you can use pwas" but only on Safari and castrated functionality. If Steve could have sold a product that didn't even use the same tcp/ip and html as everyone else, he would have. The only time he allowed the tiniest shred of interoperability is when there is no way to sell the product without it.

mrtksn 3y ago
Maybe the word he used wasn't "industry standards", I couldn't find the video now. The idea of the speech was that you can't do everything by yourself because you have just this much capacity and if you stretch yourself too much you end up with overall worse experience even if you do some things better. I think he was explaining why he is abandoning some internal Apple projects in favour of the established ones made by others.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Right but the point is he never said such things sincerely, only ever in service to some goal. He absolutely could not stand to share anything. But he could say anything necessary to attain goals.
fancyham 3y ago
Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered) Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- serf 3y ago
  flash was crappy, had poor compatibility and tons of vulnerabilities but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. Jobs interest in bad-mouthing it in the early days had more to do with cutting development costs on his side, if flash and adobe is the devil there is no need to spend time and effort developing compatibility layers for it, and it's a chance to wedge the populous towards a solution he can control more closely. 'vulnerabilities' was just the talking point he used to do so.
  - musiccog 3y ago
    > but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives. I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Flash was the great battery killer. I hated it on laptops. I'd have hated it on phones if it were available. I even hated it on desktops because it made the fans turn up. Sometimes more than a proper 3d native game that used all the hardware you could throw at it. Of course now we have Javascript and Unity games on the native side so we just changed what screws us up.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  "this lens" is quite transparent and no problem to understand at all. "makes a lot of sense" is not the question. Flash was crappy, but so what? The fact that flash was crappy didn't matter to him. If he wasn't artificially prevented by copyright, he could have and would have just wrote his own implementation that wasn't crappy. The only problem with flash was that Adobe did to him exactly the same thing he did to everyone else. Flash was a proprietary thing that didn't happen to work the way he'd like, and he wasn't allowed to just make his own better version, and so, "This needs to be an open standard!" That statement doesn't mean he endorsed or preferred or recognized the value and virtue of open standards. All it means is that he was a huge hypocrite who would say anything at any time, and actually do the opposite the instant he can devise a way to. He only ever recognized a standard when he is the beneficiary of it and there was no physically possible way to get around it, and only until he manages to devise a way to get around it. One day he says "bicycle for the mind" and that much is absolutely true. But the next day tries to sell a bicycle that the user can't repair or add a luggage rack, and conveniently declines to acknowledge that a large part of what makes a human with a bicycle so efficient is that the bicycle is simple and user-serviceable in the field and adaptable. The human is more efficient and powerful because they are literally empowered. The advantage of the wheels turn completely the other way into the disadvantage of a piece of broken machine you have to carry, after you also paid money to aquire it in the first place, when you can't fix it's bent wheel, or add a headlight or a luggage bag or a lower set of gears or fatter tires etc etc to adapt it to your individual slightly different needs. He said "bicycle for the mind", but never sold a bicycle for the mind once.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got renamed as Mac OS X when Apple bought it, was based on BSD Unix. In the early 2000s, Apple produced and used a lot of open standards. "Darwin" was open source. Bonjour is mDNS. Apple developed CUPS and open sourced it. Then they got big and greedy and stopped.
- pvg 3y ago
  The BSD use in there wasn't because of love of standards but permissive licensing. Apple didn't develop CUPS. Apple's relationship with 'standards' has always been pretty complicated although it's mostly worked out for them.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    They used BSD because then it could run Unix/POSIX applications instead of the ~0 third party applications that would have existed for a new operating system. Apple hired the maintainer of CUPS and provided the resources necessary to make it good enough for the publishing market, while continuing to publish the source code. They had enough involvement in RFCs 5227, 5387, 6761, 6762 and 6886, among others, for their company name to be listed in the RFC.
    - pvg 3y ago
      The Unix 'applications' they got for free. The OS itself shipped with a bunch of apps plus the various bits and pieces that now form the Voltron of Xcode and those were all Nextstep apps. Did the Unix part help to market the thing as a workstation? Sure. But, again, this wasn't for love of standards. The actual machine didn't ship with X11. Next didn't, I dunno, join Motif or whatever. The thing was one of the more non-standard workstations around.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        X11 shipped on the OS X install discs.
scarface_74 3y ago
So now the truth. Adobe claimed that if Apple had let them, they could have gotten Flash running on the first iPhone that had 128Kb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. Safari could barely run on the phone. If you scrolled fast, you would get a checkerbox while waiting for the page to render. When Adobe did finally bring Flash to mobile in 2010-2011 on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still ran badly. An iPhone with similar specs didn’t come out until 2011. The iMac came with only USB in 1997 before most PCs fully adopted it. The original iPod played MP3s and later AAC files and even later standard H.264 and MPegs files. The original iPhone only supported HTML5.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  An Andoid user could actually afford a phone that could run flash.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    Well, the high end phones in 2011 that could run Flash…badly… in 2011 were the same cost as iPhones.
misnome 3y ago
> That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it As did every other phone and tablet ecosystem, even the ones that tried to add flash. Turns out it was bloated, slow, insecure and battery hungry - all the reasons he stated!
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  He was always willing to use any true fact that served his goal. A rational position is different from a rationalization, even though they both involve making a rational statement along the way.
JimDabell 3y ago
> Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority. The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all. Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech. And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.

mrtksn 3y ago

Maybe the word he used wasn't "industry standards", I couldn't find the video now. The idea of the speech was that you can't do everything by yourself because you have just this much capacity and if you stretch yourself too much you end up with overall worse experience even if you do some things better. I think he was explaining why he is abandoning some internal Apple projects in favour of the established ones made by others.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
Right but the point is he never said such things sincerely, only ever in service to some goal. He absolutely could not stand to share anything. But he could say anything necessary to attain goals.

fancyham 3y ago

Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Just as importantly, Apple and Steve learned not to rely on someone else’s technology. PowerPC and all that (when Motorola stopped keeping up with Intel and Apple suffered) Look at things through this lens and their behavior over the past decade makes a lot of sense.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
serf 3y ago
flash was crappy, had poor compatibility and tons of vulnerabilities but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. Jobs interest in bad-mouthing it in the early days had more to do with cutting development costs on his side, if flash and adobe is the devil there is no need to spend time and effort developing compatibility layers for it, and it's a chance to wedge the populous towards a solution he can control more closely. 'vulnerabilities' was just the talking point he used to do so.
- musiccog 3y ago
  > but it was replaced with.. nothing. and there is still a gap in that market for novice creators that all the webgl/html5/toolkit-of-the-week has yet to cater towards. The reason Flash (and Director before it) was so popular is that it had a very low barrier to entry for creatives. I still miss Director because of how easy it was to quickly create cross platform apps that could do just about anything.
nottorp 3y ago
> Flash WAS crappy - it had so many vulnerabilities (and probably would have run terribly on the early iPhones) Flash was the great battery killer. I hated it on laptops. I'd have hated it on phones if it were available. I even hated it on desktops because it made the fans turn up. Sometimes more than a proper 3d native game that used all the hardware you could throw at it. Of course now we have Javascript and Unity games on the native side so we just changed what screws us up.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
"this lens" is quite transparent and no problem to understand at all. "makes a lot of sense" is not the question. Flash was crappy, but so what? The fact that flash was crappy didn't matter to him. If he wasn't artificially prevented by copyright, he could have and would have just wrote his own implementation that wasn't crappy. The only problem with flash was that Adobe did to him exactly the same thing he did to everyone else. Flash was a proprietary thing that didn't happen to work the way he'd like, and he wasn't allowed to just make his own better version, and so, "This needs to be an open standard!" That statement doesn't mean he endorsed or preferred or recognized the value and virtue of open standards. All it means is that he was a huge hypocrite who would say anything at any time, and actually do the opposite the instant he can devise a way to. He only ever recognized a standard when he is the beneficiary of it and there was no physically possible way to get around it, and only until he manages to devise a way to get around it. One day he says "bicycle for the mind" and that much is absolutely true. But the next day tries to sell a bicycle that the user can't repair or add a luggage rack, and conveniently declines to acknowledge that a large part of what makes a human with a bicycle so efficient is that the bicycle is simple and user-serviceable in the field and adaptable. The human is more efficient and powerful because they are literally empowered. The advantage of the wheels turn completely the other way into the disadvantage of a piece of broken machine you have to carry, after you also paid money to aquire it in the first place, when you can't fix it's bent wheel, or add a headlight or a luggage bag or a lower set of gears or fatter tires etc etc to adapt it to your individual slightly different needs. He said "bicycle for the mind", but never sold a bicycle for the mind once.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. NeXTSTEP, the Steve Jobs thing that got renamed as Mac OS X when Apple bought it, was based on BSD Unix. In the early 2000s, Apple produced and used a lot of open standards. "Darwin" was open source. Bonjour is mDNS. Apple developed CUPS and open sourced it. Then they got big and greedy and stopped.

pvg 3y ago
The BSD use in there wasn't because of love of standards but permissive licensing. Apple didn't develop CUPS. Apple's relationship with 'standards' has always been pretty complicated although it's mostly worked out for them.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  They used BSD because then it could run Unix/POSIX applications instead of the ~0 third party applications that would have existed for a new operating system. Apple hired the maintainer of CUPS and provided the resources necessary to make it good enough for the publishing market, while continuing to publish the source code. They had enough involvement in RFCs 5227, 5387, 6761, 6762 and 6886, among others, for their company name to be listed in the RFC.
  - pvg 3y ago
    The Unix 'applications' they got for free. The OS itself shipped with a bunch of apps plus the various bits and pieces that now form the Voltron of Xcode and those were all Nextstep apps. Did the Unix part help to market the thing as a workstation? Sure. But, again, this wasn't for love of standards. The actual machine didn't ship with X11. Next didn't, I dunno, join Motif or whatever. The thing was one of the more non-standard workstations around.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      X11 shipped on the OS X install discs.

scarface_74 3y ago

So now the truth. Adobe claimed that if Apple had let them, they could have gotten Flash running on the first iPhone that had 128Kb of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. Safari could barely run on the phone. If you scrolled fast, you would get a checkerbox while waiting for the page to render. When Adobe did finally bring Flash to mobile in 2010-2011 on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM and it still ran badly. An iPhone with similar specs didn’t come out until 2011. The iMac came with only USB in 1997 before most PCs fully adopted it. The original iPod played MP3s and later AAC files and even later standard H.264 and MPegs files. The original iPhone only supported HTML5.

Brian_K_White 3y ago
An Andoid user could actually afford a phone that could run flash.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  Well, the high end phones in 2011 that could run Flash…badly… in 2011 were the same cost as iPhones.

misnome 3y ago

> That kind of life experience was his entire focus and his showpiece product failed utterly at it As did every other phone and tablet ecosystem, even the ones that tried to add flash. Turns out it was bloated, slow, insecure and battery hungry - all the reasons he stated!

Brian_K_White 3y ago
He was always willing to use any true fact that served his goal. A rational position is different from a rationalization, even though they both involve making a rational statement along the way.

JimDabell 3y ago

> Steve hated industry standards. > The only time he ever said anything else was when every web site in the world ran on flash and iphone couldn't do flash. This is wildly inaccurate. Flash was never anywhere near that popular and it wasn’t an industry standard. The industry standards were HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and sites that used those were way more common than sites that ran on Flash. We’re not talking a lot more common, we’re talking at least 30–40x as common. Flash-only sites were an annoying but small minority. The iPhone was the first phone with excellent support for the HTML/CSS/JavaScript industry standards. It literally changed the web development industry it was that good. In 2007, mobile sites tended to sit on m.example.com separate from the main site, and use WAP/WML. The “really good” ones had a severely cut back plain HTML version. None used Flash, that wasn’t even a factor on mobile at all. Then along comes the iPhone with Mobile Safari. Practically overnight, people were asking for “iPhone-compatible” websites to be built, which were really just normal websites with CSS media queries to offer a mobile-friendly layout. That’s what Steve Jobs was talking about when he was describing a “desktop-class web browser” in his keynote speech. And because WebKit was open-source, all the other smartphones started using it and got the same capabilities. In the space of a year or two, the mobile web transformed from something virtually nobody wanted to something useful and fun – all using industry standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Ignoring the fact that Flash was terrible quality, which other people have responded to, that whole era of the iPhone is practically defined by Steve Jobs betting hard on industry standards instead of Flash and other proprietary stuff.