Adobe exec: Apple's fight against Flash is a 19th century tactic - Page 5

Sure. Suppose I want to buy Photoshop extended, InDesign, and Illustrator. How much will this cost me?

They already have. It is called CS5.

That is not the point. The point is that Apple will not sell apps made using any cross-compiled code, even if it delivers great looking, high performance results.

They do this in order to discourage devs from developing for not-yet-dominant platforms.

The question is whether this is legal or illegal, given several other factors.

Nobody has yet won or lost anything. This is all a calculated risk on Apple's part.

They seem to think that developers will make a special iPhone version of their app, and seemingly, that they will do so first, given the power of the App Store.

They think that the power of the app store can be leveraged to sell more devices, but more so if they have exclusive apps, or if they have the new apps first.

IOW, Apple thinks that its power in the app market can be used to disadvantage other hardware manufacturers, by hurting their app availability.

It is unknown whether this is OK, or whether it is going to be alleged to be an antitrust violation.

At this point, it is not up to Apple and Adobe. This will be over no sooner than the antitrust folks allow it to be.

Thank you for understanding the concept of market power and its importance to antitrust law (few do).

The bottom line though has to be the accrual of some unfair competitive advantages to Apple in a market in which both Apple and Adobe participate. I don't see how that case can be made.

I'm not good with USD, but I'll try to convert in my head. I think Photoshop is the kind of thing that would be most profitable in the $75-$99 range, comparable with other single applications - it's actually $700-$1000. CS is $1700-$2600, rather higher than you mentioned. Microsoft's Office goes from $150 to $680 and really their "ultimate" edition is crammed with features. Even Final Cut Studio is only $1000. So yes, Adobe's pricing is a bit disproportionate. CS would be saner value at about 3/4 of its current price; PS is massively overpriced.

To be frank, I think Adobe either has some massive internal cost management problems or is obsessed with profit per unit over cumulative profit. Actually, why am I speculating about that? I was just on their quarterly results page. $70M costs versus $800M revenue means it's about 90% profit for them. Unless I'm misreading it?

Look it up!

The design standard suite was all 3, plus acrobat pro and fireworks for $1300, which is IMHO a reasonable price, and for $400 more you can go premium and add dreamweaver, flash and fireworks...

Sure, it's expensive if you want to pick and choose individual apps, but at least there's the choice.

Try buying FInal Cut without Motion or Soundbooth, or try buying Logic without Mainstage or all the Jam Packs... not possible. I use Logic heavily, but have never touched mainstage or the jam packs... would have been nice to save a couple hundred bucks on a "Logic Only" product, but Apple does the bundle to rake in a bit of extra cash...

The suite system works great for both companies, and basically all real professionals make use of the full respective suites anyways (except mainstage and the jam packs, they're more for the bedroom producers), except maybe Wedding Photogs, who normally use Lightroom + Photoshop.

Anyways, the preliminary tests for 64-bit Premiere have it performing most tasks about 75% faster than Final Cut on machines with over 4GB of memory. If Apple doesn't get its shit together fast and make Final Cut a 64-bit application, their market share is going to get eaten into pretty quickly - time is big money in video production, and if the software end can save people even 10 minutes on the hour, I know a huge number of people will switch... The fact that it integrates so well with Photoshop/After Effects (which is also 64-bit, while Motion isn't), is also pretty huge.

It's amusing in a way that Jobs called out Adobe for lagging on OSX development, while for the one industry that can make use of 64-bit technology, Apple is dragging it's feet much more than Adobe... Hell, 10.6.3 is breaking large portions of OpenGL, and crashing CS3 (which wasn't happening on 10.6.1)

Get your facts straight, pal.

First, if you only want to spend a hundred bucks on Photoshop, then buy photoshop elements. If you only think it's worth $99, you're probably looking for something like an "iWork" sort of casual version of it, and Elements totally fits the bill.

Also, the design standard suite is $1300 for 4 programs. ($333 per app).
Design Premium is $1900 for 8 apps, or $213 per app. If you consider Flash Pro + Catalyst as a single app, it's still just $270 per app.
Master collection is $2600 for 11+ apps, so $236 per app.

Compare that to Final Cut Studio, which is basically 3 programs for $1000, or Logic Studio, which is $500 for basically 2 programs, and it all looks very even.

Microsoft Office is only $100 per program, but it also straddles the line between professional and consumer, so it has to be priced lower. (similar to where Photoshop Elements or Final Cut Express lies).

And you are misreading that PDF.

Look on "Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets" - 3 months ending March 5 2010 shows gross profits of $769,332,000, operating expenses of $592,499,00, for an operating income of $176,833,000 and after taxes a net income of $127,154,000.

Thats a 16% profit margin, which I think is pretty fair to the shareholders. I assume Apple's is similar. They're publicly traded companies, after all...

Exactly. Apple knows that the App store is the iPhone's best asset moving forward. If every app could be ported to other platform by simply clicking an extra box on the "Save As" dialog in Flash Builder, it would seriously hurt the iPhone's footing against Android products. Apple ain't dumb, they want to avoid this like the plague.

I thought it was all sarcastic, but I suppose it could be bad astroturfing.


Photoshop is a professional piece of software, as well as the rest of the Creative Suite. Compared to the value of the talent that use this kind of software, it's nothing. Also, not as many people need anything in the Creative Suite as there are people that need MS Office. If you don't want to pay the long dollar, they offer an Elements version which does quite a lot. I really don't think the pricing so terribly out of line when compared to Final Cut Studio, FCS is very focused (no equivalent to PS, Indesign or Illustrator, nevermind all the other tools in CS) The CS packages simply offer a lot broader range of tools in several commonly used combinations.

Oh and how do you know this? Where is your facts that Apple is plotting unfair practice of app development? Sounds a lil biased to me I would say!! Look we all know every year Apple releases new API's for iPhone OS! And why do they? It's simple; competition, consumer demand, just because they want to offer something "cool", the list goes on as to why. But the fact is they do. And have been doing so with every OS update every year or so. We also know Apple keeps these API's under a tight wrap until they unveil them at WWDC or whenever they choose. iPhone SDK is Apple's tools for opening up these API's and does not want to rely on some third party tool(flash) to play catch up when and if they ever do or can for that matter! It's not in Apples interest to make all developers happy. Just the ones that are serious about the iPhone and the platform as a whole!! Hell there are to many as of now imagine if they opened up the "flash" floodgates!! Look we Mac users know that not all developers develope for the Mac but we sure do love the ones that are committed to the platform. I hope I make myself clear!
And to add. I believe Apple knows that some developers see the iPhone as a get rich quick platform and now are seeing the mobile app (and let's be honest, the mobile app system that Apple made popular) as a way to make a quick buck. Porting there Flash Apps to all platforms. Leaving out vital API's that either platform has put into place. Apple is a company that tries to stand above the rest of the industry. Sort of lead the way. Some people hate this pride in Apple, buy hey it is what it is. But love them or hate them: you do watch them! Like I said, I love the Mac platform. I love the dedicated developers that develope for them. And let me tell you the developers that do develope for the Mac are Mac users themselves and are loyal to the platform. So if this decision by Apple only keeps the truly loyal iPhone app developers around well, than so be it because Mac users are quite used to it and quite frankly we like it that way!!

its apples ball
its apple ballfield
its apples faithful
its apple ipad imac mbp- touch ipod 160g
iphones etc etc

apple created adobe way back when
apple even owned 1/5 of adobe

adobe is welcome to create and play on all the other android whatevers it wants
adobe was welcome to screw the apple world for years with glacial updates while giving bowjobs to msft wintel drones
adobe is not welcome on apple anymore ..their reap what they sow or sow what th....

so here we are with crashing macs and adode flash to blame
and here come click to flash and presto all my old macs speed rightt up

the world wide apple fan anger at adode is extreme
so goodbye to adobe un til they bow to apple and pay homage to the top innovator of all time

adobe will soon be a back water company

hp is next

peace
9

So don't install them. That's fine.

I love Java application on my Mac and want it to be me who makes the call if I want to have them installed and not you, God Steve, or anyone else. I am pretty sure if Java apps are allowed on iPad, there would be some that might have value to many people. Not you, OK. Just leave others alone.

If Apple makes AppStore non-exclusive, none of this bullshit talk is necessary. Common Apple, you can do it. It is no big deal.

It won't take long before someone implements Cocoa Touch API on other platform so it would allow (some of) the developers of those 200 000 iPhone apps to build their apps for other platforms as well, by merely compiling for a different target.

This way Apple would lose their "best asset". Hopefully then they realize that standardization is inevitable, in the same way the railroad makers were forced to standardize.

Decreasingly so, it seems:

Apple's brand 'buzz' loses steam among young adults in survey
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...in_survey.html

Apple's recent bullying was cited as a contributing factor in this downward trend.

That argument is specious. If an app make with Apple's tools fails to access the new API it will not be rejected.

If the identical app were made using a cross-compiler, it would be rejected.

Sorry. But the API issue is a red herring.

We can argue all day about how some apps take advantage of the API's and some don't. There are how many App's now? Some 200,000 now? The point is Apple has a business model that they feel is in the best interest for them. Yes I did say for THEM!! And for its customers, cause let's face it, the customers vote with there wallets and Apple's year over year growth and a huge "war chest" has proven that customers are very happy with the decisions that Apple has made. But that aside, let me ask do you really think Android is totally "open"? Yes Android is more open than say Apple but "completly" open? I just read that Android has it's own private API's. To me the only "true" open OS is Linux and not to rag on Linux, but what market share do they have? 1% maybe!! Look "open" is not always best anyway. Sometimes a close system is better for the "end user". That is how Apple plays in this arena. If you do not like that or if "you" are a Flash developer, I can understand your fustration with Apple's decision. The iPhone is an attractive market and that is also why Apple is taking the "heat" for this (especially Flash developers). EVERYONE wants to develope for the iPhone. Apple says sure you can, but by our "rules". Let me ask another question: Do you really think Google cares about the "end user" experience? Really do you? I reckon not! And why? Because Google's business is advertising! That's it. That is why they give all this shit away for free. The more you use the internet, the better it is for Google (because they have a monopoly in internet advertising, but that is another argument). If your Andriod device does not support a certain feature:API, and you call Google(BTW good luck on calling them) they will say "It's the hardware!" and vise versa if you call the hardware company they will say "it is Google!" And as a former Windows user I know all to well about this back and forth battle!! However Apple does not have that luxury to spin off the customer. Apple owns the whole "ecosystem": hardware and software. So unlike Google who's business model is "eyeballs" on the internet, Apple DOES!! have an interest in how the "user experience" is! It IS their "business model!!" Are they right in there decission? That is yet to be seen. But I will try to repeat a quote from the CEO of Warner Music earlier this week: he said something to point: "not many people have made money betting against Steve Jobs, and he for one was not betting against him!"

Flash developers argument is that Apple is taking away the ability to cross compile between OS's. But I ask, can't the same tools and language that Apple is asking of it's developers bs used on other platforms? I mean after all it is Objective C, Java, and all... I am just asking. If the iPhone is that important to developers, and Android is "so open", why can't the same language that is used to make iPhone apps be used on other platforms?

There is a difference between language and APIs (ie the libraries). No one is being prevented from creating development tools in Obj-C for other platforms. Some are available from GNU (though probably not ported to Android). The difference is the APIs. These are unique to each platform. It's what lets your program talk to the operating system to tell it to draw a box, respond to a click, open a network connection, etc. This is different on every platform. Flash is a platform. It has it's own way of doing this. It acts as a layer between the programmer and the native APIs. Java is the same way too actually. It is both a language and a platform with it's own cross platform APIs.

One of Apple's concerns is that if the programmer is programming for Flash then what if Adobe stops Or is slow to support new features provided by Apples APIs? It effectively gives Adobe control over what an app can/can't do. This is bad for Apple because it makes iPhone apps no different than Android apps. Why would a consumer buy an iPhone if a cheaper Android can literally do the samething? Adobe won't care if they are the same aslong as you pay for it's Flash development tools. Flash will never be able to do anything that the host platform won't let it. It takes the lowest common denominator and makes it the standard.

This is the essence of being "cross platform". The developer gives up native features for the convenience of doing less work to get their app to run on multiple platforms.