Steve Jobs slams Adobe Flash as unfit for modern era - Page 2

Except what you said is false. H.264 is NOT part of HTML5 (which is why Firefox can continue supporting it, without being non-open).

And as Steve correctly states, it is an Industry Standard (which is also true, and not true of Flash).

Also, the only "open" alternative to H.264 until a couple of weeks ago was Ogg-Theora. This was a non-starter because of mainly extremely poor HW support, and almost non-existent quantity of content (how much of Youtube is Theora? Ans: 0%).

2-3 weeks ago, Google released VP8 as open-source, however, since that was only a couple of weeks ago, there is no content in that format, and also, no hardware (or decent software) support for it. It will take at least a few years before it becomes popular, so is not a viable choice right now.

Steve Jobs is spot on here.

Adobe already has tools for flash to html5 conversion, and on top of that a lot of html5 authoring tools are already sold by Adobe now.

Please can everyone stop talking out of their ass and use google for just a few seconds before posting?

here's an interview with mark randall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aafYF-hLHvo

Perfect, Steve, and you're going to have to write another exposition of the LAW and business reality in clear language to dispel the 'Apphole' meme. Yes you have to educate the masses who have lost their moral, ethical and legal compass.

Love live the facts, logic and truth! Dispel darkness forevermore!

Steve does not want Adobe to die. He wants them to get off their lazy butts and return to greatness. They started going bad when they charged insane amounts for their fonts, and have been off track ever since. Resurrect the original Adobe.

Royalty-free until 2016.

I appreciate this letter and it's all true, but I don't think Adobe should be chastised for just going to Cocoa when so many of Apple's own apps are still running in Carbon.



Firefox is going against GPU and CPU leaders industry from the HW to the OS to the browser. There is no way that they can win against MS, Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia, and every ARM-based device.

The only saving grace for Firefox and Opera is Google's purchase of VP8. They might be able to make it better than H.264 in the long run, get into chips for decoding and even make it free or charge. But for the next 5 years H.264 is where it's at and Firefox will just fall behind as companies aren't going to want to encode Theora and H.264 when only one is good quality and HW decoded.

edit: Pipped by addicted44. Doh!



hile I figure he's using the next gen iPhone at this point, the current one can do 10 hours of H.264 video.

•

http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html The beauty of H.264 is the decoding in HW from so many major players. Ogg really sucks!

Do you even know what open means?

And we'll all be dead by then anyways.

2012, HELLOOOO?

Except, it most likely wont be part of the HTML5 standard. The WHATWG group (the one with all the browsers as members, and which has really driven development of HTML5) seems to be okay with not specifying a codec in the standard. I think the W3C will also do the same.

Also, its not like there isn't a precedent for this. Consider the IMG tag. You can post JPEG, GIF, PNG, or any other image format you would like. It all works. The same should/will be true of the video tag, although, much like the case of IMG tag, one format will end up being most popular (JPEG for images, and H.264 for video).

Ignore the content for just a second and consider the delivery. Steve is the very recognizable face of Apple Inc., and he essentially throws down directly at a competitor. Where is "Mr. Adobe?" How will he respond? There really isn't a credible way for anyone at Adobe to respond - no one will listen to some non-descript VP of corporate isoterica explain why Apple is wrong. In this case, Steve is right because he is Steve.

Steve and Apple have this craft down to an Art. There is *no way* for Adobe to debate these issues with their now disappearing supporters. Sure, argue in their stead, but Apple wins this whole thing where it matters hands down because Jobs spells chapter and verse of why he's right. It doesn't matter if he really is.

What you are saying is undeniably false. HTML5 does not "include" h.264 for video playback, the format for embedding video with the video tag within HTML5 is currently undefined.

No matter what you think of Apple or Adobe, a few things should be pretty obvious.

Adobe SHOULD have gotten off their butts and made a serious attempt at engaging Apple at a high level on this subject. The feeling I get is Adobe didn't think much of the iPhone, and certainly never embraced OSX.

Adobe is a much, much smaller company whose earnings are increasingly unreliable and who should be looking out for their own good by preemptively seeking solutions.

Again, I get the feeling they rode their Flash wagon and never stopped to engage Apple on this at all.

Again, they have a lot to loose. Apple does not. This is not fanboy drivel. This is a fact. Adobe is not a healthy company and instead of partnering, or trying to solve issues they have ignored Apple and the platform.

I have used Adobe products since, gawd,, 1990 or so. And there is no doubt that the experience is not been getting better.

No matter what you feel bout the Flash issue, everyone would have to agree that Adobe injured their relationship with Apple and are now trying to strong arm them with all the vitriol they have unleashed. I think a wiser method would have been to just quietly work on the issue instead of declaring war. Obviously their corporate leaders didn't think this out. They could have remained quietly working away on amazing solutions for mobile Flash. Solutions that save battery and integrate touch.

Instead they threw a tantrum. And they may have done more damage than they can repair. We can watch their stock and earnings. Maybe HP will have to buy them to.

i love how people always miss those two very very important works up to

Take that, Shantanu!

Bravo, Steve Jobs!!! OUTSTANDING LETTER!!!

The fees are only waived until 2016, where after sites serving H.264 internet video will have to pay MPEG LA $5 million. It is not "open" in any respect whatsoever. It is closed and proprietary, just like Flash. You're going from one closed standard in Flash to another in H.264. It's meaningless. And Steve Jobs is a liar. I am not an advocate of Flash or any other proprietary standard. Apple is Adobe is Microsoft, etc.

Oh and, Quadra 610...cute chart.

Isnt iTunes still Carbon based? I agree that Adobe drags its feet at best, but if the heart of your media empire hasnt "fully" adopted Mac OS X then....
iTunes performs reasonably on most of my Macs but I do have to say that it can freeze the system at will when it decides it needs to. I guess it being their main cross-platform effort limits them as much as it limits Adobe.

retract my comment if I am wrong about iTunes.

Wow.

That happened.

It has become apparent that you don't understand the difference between Open as in Open Source and open as in Open Standard. Take an hour, read both pages and hopefully you'll realize that just because they both contain the word Open, doesn't mean that they have to be the same thing.

If Steve had claimed that H.264 is simply Open, then your argument might have merit. However, he did not, his use of the term falls inline with many (most) of the formal definitions for the term by Standards Development Organizations, and as a result you are are the one who is wrong.

[I changed my post to say "support", because like you say, that's essentially what they are saying]

I like that I can use H.264 in almost any video container. There is an h264 container, but generally you'd use .mp4, .mov, .avi, etc... it's really up to the browsers to support the codec (but the W3C does need to define its support for the codecs, which is where the problems lay).

Easy. He wrote it to shut up the people that are bad mouthing the decision not to support Flash on the ipad etc. To give Apple's side of what is not just some sandbox fight or just about supporting app sales etc.

And here's the fun, how many sites etc have moved to stand on Apple's side, or at least on the line since the ipad was announced and released. Netflix makes an app; ABC makes an app; CBS announces an HTML5 version of their video site; even more rumors of a Hulu app; youtube, which has always had an app, beta tests html5; facebook is testing HTML5 for videos; farmville, one of the biggest games on facebook, is rumored to be working on an app and so on.

Just use HTML5

No big deal.

Sent from iPhone

And he admits as much. That was the point of his sixth point. It would be very dangerous for Apple to leave control of items like dev tools in the hands of third parties. They could be inferior to Apples, but their convenience might cause a good number of devs to use them. If that happened, whenever Apple rolled out new features and APIs, they could not count on developers taking advantage of them thereby hobbling the massive expenditures of R&D that the put into these new features. If Apple want the iPhone experience for all users to improve as they improve the platform, a dependancy on third party dev tools is extraneous at best. It would massively counter productive in general, for devs and for Apple.

I have no problem with Apple wanting control over their platform, though sometimes I question how the exercise that control. This isn't one of those cases.

As Jobs said, if Adobe really wants to get on the iPhone train, then they can create tools for HTML5 development. This would allow them to keep all of what they claim are the benefits of Flash development, i.e. cross platform, common, rapid, etc. It would obviously cost them in resources, but no one said business was free.

And...

It's sort of like the USA floating our carriers around the world. WHo is going to object?

Adobe (se post below) should have been trying to engage APple on this quietly and proactively. Not by throwing a hissy fit. They invited this by unleashing the 'evangelists' who are like midget-hitman. WHy would they go so public with this?

I don't get how they ever thought they could win this.

They INVITED this kind of fight didn't they? What was the name of their little evangelist who wrote his temper tantrum and declared he would never buy Apple products again and blah, blah, blah.

Well you might thank him for this.

Play with fire and -

Just because you don't seem to understand does not mean Jobs is a liar.

Jobs never said a word about H.264 in his statement. So no he's not a liar.


or MPEG LA might decide to waive the fees again. It is their choice. They might even just drop the whole idea of fees and make h.264 a free for all.

Most Adobe products have code that's over 20 years old. Adobe has sat on their asses for years piling small amounts of new code on top of old code creating new bloated, slow products.

They've had no competition on the Mac side since Corel disappeared so they've had no incentive to improve their dinosaur products.

Apple is giving them a kick in the ass to join the 21st century and Adobe doesn't like it.

Ha Ha! That never gets old.........well sorta.

I was wondering about that myself. Wasn't one of the main features in Snow Leopard that the finder became almost all Cocoa (maybe this was done with Leopard). Anyway, it does seem a bit odd that Jobs brings up Adobe's slow effort to move to all Cocoa when Apple also took quite some time.

the nail in the coffin for me was when one of Adobe's people admitted that they wrote Flash for Windows, and then just ported it to the Mac via slapping on some translation code. So since it works great in Windows, it is also great on the Mac OS.

um, yeah

I've already sent Steve an email to correct his spelling mistake in paragraph six. BlackBerry's second "B" is capitalized. Believe me, I'm not a grammar Nazi and don't own a BlackBerry device and normally wouldn't care, but I:

- live in Waterloo (home to RIM)
- work with an ex-VP of RIM
- am married to an awesome writer/editor

I had no choice but to send an email.

Please, kind Sir, tell me what I don't understand. I understand that Steve Jobs conveniently failed to mention that Apple will make money when a content provider pays the $5 million license fee since they hold patents on the technology. I understand that their "open" industry standard H.264 is just as closed and proprietary as Flash. I understand that Steve Jobs is an egomaniac and a control freak who can't stand the thought of using truly "open" and "free" standards.

It looks like AI decided to change the title of the article to something more inflammatory. Don't worry, we'll get to 300 posts, just give it time.

Seriously dude, why don't you and Richard Stahlman go build your little fantasy opensores world together and stop bothering the rest of us? Nobody is interested in running a third rate Ogg Vorbis codec with poor performance characteristics and no hardware acceleration (mobile or desktop).

No. Any company that sells the encoding/decoding/trans-coding of H264 will have to pay the licensing fees, not a random business that decides to post a video in H264 on their website. So, Google will have to pay the $5 million (or w/e it is) as royalties/licensing fees. Adobe will have to pay for it. Apple has to pay for it. They sell/provide services/products that encode/decode/trans-code video. The playback of that video on a website using HTML5 has already been paid for by the person who developed the browser and the cost to encode to that video has already been paid for through use of a encoder/trans-coder purchased.

Commercial streaming = pay fee

Small business with a profile video on web-page = no fee

Unless I'm missing something...


addition:
and as far as I can see, its not $5million flat - its $0.20 per unit (from 100,000 to 5 million units) and $0.10 per unit (above 5 million units) with a capped cost of $5 million.

and under 100,000 = no fee

iTunes, iLife and many of their pro apps are still using legacy code. I suspect iTunes X will come out this fall for the next iPod/iTunes event. The others might appear this year, too. I have to think that if Jobs is stating how Adobe is still using Carbon that Apple may be ready to drop all Carbon this year, which would make that statement valid (after the fact) since it will be few years of CS5 using Carbon while Apple is full Cocoa. Just an assumption. They might not even support Carbon in the next version of Mac OS X if the rumour that no 10.7 preview will be coming until 2011.

Keep buying into the lies. SHEEPLE!

Third party IDE's NOT from adobe include:
FlashDevelop
Eclipse with AIR / Flex SDK (Flex is open source and free)
swfmill
swish
SWFTool
haxe
etc...
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_F...rd-party_tools

And if you're talking about alternatives to flash player:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Playback

You don't need adobe to exist to keep flash rolling, they're just the main company behind the momentum of flash and for obvious reasons. They have the best creative suites and they sell like crazy because they are the best. AIR runs with webkit and HTML5 included. Flash is far less closed than Objective C. Flex is open source. AMF is open source. Eclipse is open source. I'd say Adobe is taking a seriously unjust pounding by a bunch of people who don't know crap about crap.

The thing is loads of tablet computers supporting flash running on android and win7 will make it to the market soon. If Steve is right then those devices will have short battery life and multi-touch flash apps will suck. If not the ipad is going to be in trouble.

Well with the amont of AAPL stocks I have he better be right

Sweet. Very well written.

Because a day doesn't go by that some 3rd rate reviewer or reporter doesn't bring up freedom from Flash (or as they put it, 'lack of Flash') as a negative for Apple's mobile products.
This letter just puts a stake in that meme's heart.