Adobe, Apple working together on Flash for iPhone - Page 3

Ads aren't bad, because someone has to pay for this stuff we all like.

This is like the argument about "free" Tv and pay Tv. You pay for it one way or the other.

Would you rather pay for it by seeing a few Ads, or by having to pay a subscription fee for every site you visit?

Do you want to pay a subscription for AI if they don't have Ads? If so, how much? $25 a year? $50 a year? $100 a year?

How many other sites and services do you want to pay for on the web?

Should you always be charged a penny or so whenever you click on a page? Would that be better than Ads?

How do you propose that anything other than commercial sites that are selling you something to begin with, pay for themselves?

How about $1,000 (or more) a year paid into some universal fund?

I'm not sure who is following this chain of logic. I would not say I want flash to fail. I would like it to have some competition and an industry wide call for its use to be more disciplined.

All I'm saying it that MS tends to want much tighter control over things than does Adobe.

Do you really want everything on the web to be an MS technology?

Do you think that's a good idea?

Would you also like to see MS controlling search rather than Google?

I don't think its a good idea for one company to control the "airwaves" so to speak. It's much better when several companies, opposed to each other, do it.

Can anyone explain why Flash on the iPhone is even being discussed by Adobe at the World Economic Forum?
Come to think of it, why is Adobe even at the World Economic Forum?

Is it any wonder the world economy is in such bad shape?

He's right nevertheless.

Do you work for free? Do you pay no rent? Is your food, clothing, entertainment (except for much on the web now) all for free?

Who is supposed to pay for the people working in AI? who pays for the writers? Who pays for th server bandwidth? The webmasters? What about the accountants? All the rest?

How about chipping in a few thousand?

I know we joke about this stuff, and I'm pretty sure you're joking as well, from what I see of the rest of your post, but this is pretty serious, and there are some others who don't understand it..

Since his post was in answer to mine, I'm assuming you're referring to me.

But it's certainly not true that I hate everything not Apple, and it's dubious logic on your part to say so.

Flash isn't an Apple technology, though you seem to think it is since I'm pleading its case, and you think I don't like anything thats not Apple. Very strange.

I'm just concerned that we don't allow one company to take over all the standards used on the web.

There's already enough problems with too many companies hewing to IE's proprietary "standards". So if we get more proprietary standards, I'd rather they came from others than MS. There must be a balance, if we can't get what we all want (I assume), which is a totally open standards net.

Flash is about as much a standard as is anything else, for good or ill. I'm certainty not against it, though others are.

I find it no worse than many other things.

It's the logic I'm seeing from several posters. The total train of thought doesn't have to be spelled out to see where it's going.

Adobe is far more suited to be at that forum than were such luminaries and economic powers as Bono, in years past.

Adobe's software is widely used in commerce, and in developing much that we see around us. This affects their business as much as any other.

And its sheer arrogance to think I was referring to you on my reply to Vineas well worded post.

Its the 90% of the other postings in this forum that want Flash gone and have gone as far to call it evil.

Although not unexpected to see in this room but purely wrong. I programming language, browser etc cant be evil.

Adobe is and has lead the market on streaming video (and yes Flash ads) right now and since Jobs doesnt like Adobe the sheep in this room spew nonsense that Flash isnt used and nobody wants it.

I visit ESPN & CNN many times a day and the iPhone is useless on it and since its on 98% of all desktop computers I dont seem to be alone.

I dont have the Internet in my pocket if I cant view Flash on ESPN & CNN, I have a website with a bunch of little blue squares.

Both ESPN and CNN have iPhone optimized sites that use no flash. The ESPN site has interactive graphics built from AJAX and streaming video.

Arrogance? You clearly misunderstand the meaning of the word.

Generally, when one responds to a post, and that poster responded to was about something that the previous poster was speaking to, and you then say that some seen to only like something specific, then that first poster has every right to ASK if this was directed to him.

All you had to do was to say "no".

We do this all the time. You don't have to be a wiseguy about it.

The odd thing here is that you are too blinded by your clever use of the word arrogant, to address the rest of my response, which amusingly enough, is about the same as yours.

We actually seem to AGREE on this, though you don't seem to understand it.

I don't want a site that is optimized for the iPhone. I wan't what I'm used to on my desktop and I want all of the streaming video not just what they have optimized for phones that don't support a full browser.

That wasn't supposed to be the point of the iPhone, If I wanted a scaled down version of any site then any smart phone with a browser would work.

Hardly. Adobe has shown itself capable of being as ham fisted as MS. So has Apple for that matter.


I'd rather Silverlight succeed than fail to keep Flash honest.


MS has never really dominated the web. Even so, it has done far better than other corporate entities. Do you really think Netscape or even Google to be more altruistic than MS?


What are the quantifiable benefits of Google dominance over MS dominance? In what way would MS search be different today than Google search to the general public? That Google is more efficient at managing and paying adwords is a given...but in what way does this benefit the consumer of web searches?


Then you should be hoping that Silverlight can take significant share from Flash.

Personally, I've never minded Microsoft dominance because I came from the Unix world. Better that MS conquered the world than ANY of those guys or we'd be paying $5000 per app on $20,000 machines as the dominant business model.

Even Mac was never as consumer friendly as the Wintel platform. The UI was fantastically better but the costs have always been significantly higher. Sufficiently so that had Apple and not MS been dominant I would guess that widespread use of computers by the general public would have been pushed back by a decade.

Unreasoned hatred of MS is just as silly as unreasoned adoration of Apple.

Here's a test for you. Name another computer company anywhere in the world of that same period that would have been more trustworthy with monopoly power than Microsoft from the consumer perspective?

Not Univac, Sperry, DEC, Sun, or even Digital Research (CP/M) would have charged so little for their operating system on systems so inexpensive as IBM, MS and Intel did during those crucial years IMHO. $40 for an OS? Nor would IBM had been any better a custodian in the long haul.

I think few on this site follow like "sheep", however many of us share the same ideals as Jobs, which will lead us to the same conclusions, which is often misconstrued by people such as yourself as "sheep" like behavior, or fanboyism.

I believe most people here are objective in comparison to other technology forums.

If we possessed "sheep" like personality traits we would be using windows.

EDIT,
Read Vinea's posting that answered your question much better than I could have.
He also clearly doesn't agree worth you logic either.

Please insight us with an answers to his questions. He seems to have a better understanding of the situation than you and I and backs it up with logic.

No. I had Gmail forward my mail to MM. I am a graduate student and most of my email goes through my University account. I always had that forwarded to my Gmail account. When MM came out, I didn't want to have it forwarded to Gmail and then forwarded to MM. That was just too much forwarding. So, I just had it forwarded to MM. But, MM doesn't save all messages as Gmail does, so I ended up losing messages b/c I accidentally deleted them and had no way to retrieve them. That, I admit is my fault and not MM's. But, Gmail has the fabulous "Archive" feature and huge server space so I never lose messages. But, my major problem with MM was that they would just randomly lose messages. People would send me messages and I would never get them or I would get them 24-48 hours after they sent originally sent the message. That was just unacceptable. I switched my university account to forward to Gmail and the problem went away. Sorry, but Gmail is just a nicer email account and it's free.

I prefer de facto vs de jure standards, mostly because many de jure standards are designed by committee and have more than passing resemblances to camels as opposed to horses.

I prefer KML over GML...at least in the areas that KML addresses.

In that sense, I should prefer Flash to HTML5 but Flash has had such crappy implementations on non-Windows platforms that it might as well be a MS product. And Adobe is no less protective of its monopoly status (within its markets) than any other company.

I think you are being overly critical. Their are clear reasons for optimized sites. The iPhone has an entirely different UI convention than a desktop.

The page is laid out to fit the size of the screen. The page uses larger words that are easier to read, larger buttons that are easier to touch with a finger. The page uses less graphics so that it can load faster.

Standard web pages built for desktop interfaces are too large for the phone's screen, the words are too small to read, the buttons are too small to touch. So you end up shrinking and enlarging constantly to navigate the page.

The problem with your logic is that you think of it as a scaled down page. Its not scaled down, its optimized for the interface.

Not all smartphone browsers support full HTML, but yeah the point should be that all smartphones can use the same optimized websites.

Historically the problem with MS is that Windows is their bread and butter. So their motivation is to keep everything tied into an ecosystem that revolves around Windows. That would limit innovation into other technologies and platforms that would not be dependent on revolving around Windows.

I would argue that Google, Macromedia, Yahoo, AOL, and other web services have forced MS to focus more on providing web services that don't necessarily tie directly into Windows the way MS would have without the competition.

Porn is Flash.
Men watch Porn.
Porn sells.
Enough said?

Amiga would have!

RIP

Adobe is better than is MS in this. Adobe doesn't attempt to coerce others as MS has been shown to do, in both unethical, and illegal ways.


I don't want to see Silverlight fail either. I have it on my machines. I just don't want to see it push Flash out.


If its server software continues to push Linux out, it will be controlling that major area. There are other MS technologies that are in a sense "controlling" because so many web sites have given up interoperability for convenience. Thankfully, due to both Firefox and Apple's upswing in popularity, things are slowly moving in the other direction.

I do think that Netscape was far more altruistic than is MS. Netscape gave away most all of its own innovations. MS has not, except where they think it will tighten control for their other purposes.

After Netscape was destroyed, MS hunkered down with IE, and we saw nothing of value since, until Firefox came along. And really, though there are hopeful signs that IE's reign may slowly end, the jury is still out on that one. This isn't just my opinion, as you know, but also that of most of the PC world as well.

As far as Google is concerned, they have done some good, but the main point here is that it's better that the power be split up rather than to lay in one hand.


You would rather the company that controls the World of the OS, and is coming to rule the servers used on the internet, also rule search, and anything else we rely on?

You want it all in the hands of MS?

You want that one company to have even more power to push through what may be good for it, but not anyone else?

I'd rather see different points of power duking it out. That's best for all of us.

I don't see MS doing anything significant if they have no stiff competition. The same is true of others, but it's MS that holds most of the cards in the computer industry right now. I see no reason to give them all the rest.

The difference that I see is that somehow, MS would try to subvert it as they've tried with everything else to keep it working better with Windows. Look at what they attempted to do to JAVA. Change it enough so that those working with MS's version would be constrained to Windows.


I hope it takes enough share to keep Adobe innovating its product.


It certainly wasn't MS that was responsible for cutting those costs. That happened long before MS grabbed hold of the PC OS. It's been shown that they could cut the price of their software by half, and still make billions in profit each year, but they don't. It's not our interests they have at heart. And, thats fine. But without good stiff competition, they have no reason to be generous.


That's not really true. Every year, going back over two decades, IDC, and other companies that do this work, have shown that ROI on Macs is much better than that of Windows machines. That's even true if only a small number of Macs are present in the environment.

Yes, upfront costs are higher.


So, reasoned hatred is ok?

I don't hate MS, I just don't trust their motives. This is something that we know about MS. It's not unreasoned thinking to look back at the first federal lawsuit against them in the early '90's when they first killed their big opposition. Nor is it unreasoning to look back at the last one, or the current ones.

I don't know of any major company in recent memory that has had such a record.

Still, they do produce useful products in several areas. I don't deny that. I use some of them.


That's not a useful question. I don't want to see ANY of these companies with monopoly power. ANY!!!

The problem is that MS does have that power, and they don't handle it well. I don't believe they should be given more.


I'm not saying any of them would have been. Certainly not Apple.

But the point is that MS IS in that position, and has been for some time, and it hasn't been good in many ways.

Certainly, standardizing on one OS and hardware set has been "good" for business, in that it eased their entry into computerization. But many computer experts have also said that it has stalled progress, and that the balance between the two might have been negative.

Personally, other than for my own preferences and investments, I think it would be best if somehow there was about an even split between Windows, OS X, and some form of UNIX that's out there, not necessarily some Linux distro, but possibly that.

Competition would then be at its highest, costs would be at their lowest, and progress would be at its fastest.

I remember how fast things evolved in the short years before the PC first came out, and how quickly they cooled off after Windows arrived. It pretty much killed off everything other than the Mac.

His logic is fine, if you areee with it. I don't.

I understand what he is saying. We've had many arguments in the past, believe me.

We're looking at this from different perspectives.

From his perspective, he's correct. From mine, I'm correct.

We can both bring arguments to bear that if you agree with them make the logic work.

I assume this would also be the source of complaints re: using the iPhone one handed.

I have no arguments with that.

It varies. It depends on how political the standards process gets. Like MS trying to push their own Word standard through the committee. Seems as though that worked, but then it seems as though a bit of unethical behavior was found. It's now stalled.

Also look to Open CL. Pretty much every company has signed on except MS. Well this is a very political process again.

DirectX is only available for Windows, and it's mostly usful for games.

Open CL is much more useful, and will work with everything, and every OS, if the manufacturer of that OS wants to use it.

Most de jure standards start out as de facto standards, but then are adopted by the community in an official way.

Meanwhile there is a sticky on the AI iPhone forum asking for help developing mobile AI without any mention of compensation.

Yes. That's because there is so little money available to these sites. moderators don't get paid either.

It's a collaboration between paid and unpaid personnel, as is true on most non commercial sites where income is small, but enthusiasm is large.

Now, if they had more Ads, or charged subscriptions, or did both, as some sites do...


I'm not saying they should do this, but it's being done. ArsTechnica has Ads, and has voluntary subscriptions, which some pay. I used to, but stopped when Safari was having problems with the e-mail notices, but may begin again.

Daring Fireball asks for subscriptions (you even get a shirt, sometimes, if they're not out), and has some small Ads as well.

If mobile devices are becoming advertisers primary targets and iPhones already represent more than half of all global web page hits made on mobile devices, while making up only slightly more than 10% of all mobile devices, then why would advertisers abandon Flash in favor of Silverlight?

Mobile advertising, while growing at a good pace, is still just a very small percentage of all web advertising.

The probability that Windows Server takes large amounts of share from Linux/BSD + Apache remains remote. There is a lot of growth for Windows Server but mostly for workgroup servers.

http://news.netcraft.com/

Apache gained 1% share in January. That said, I run Apache on Windows rather than IIS sometimes.


No, netscape did not. First, the only reason that IE really gained share was because Netscape said they were going to start charging for their browser. Second, Netscape made most of their money from servers which they sure as heck weren't giving away. Also, all of Netscape's technology was largely built off work done at NCSA by the principles.


Netscape destroyed itself by both claiming to want to start charging for their browser and not improving that browser much until after IE started eating it for lunch. Both Netscape and MS indulged in non-standard extension to their browsers.


Really? MOST of the PC World?


I said I don't mind if it happened. Not that I necessarily wanted it to. Which is better than wishing ill on Linux like you do.


Gee, I wonder where I wrote that? Oh, nowhere. I said that MS HAD that power and from a consumer perspective we did rather well.

So, you cannot name another computing company that you think would have done a better job than evil old MS eh?


MS is one of the more aggressive companies looking to innovate. I'm sure that you can't see that but they have been either through their own research (they do quite a bit) or acquisition.


Try developing Java on OSX. I need to buy a new laptop because of Apple's policy toward Java.


Say what? CP/M was more than $40. Name any other commercial operating system you could get for $40.


So, it should be easy then to name another company in the 80s that was doing that. MS made two things extremely cheap: Operating systems and office suites. Wang was selling word processing machines for over $5000 when the PC could do it for far less.


Oh get real...those TCO numbers are relevant for businesses but not households where the initial capital costs are the main barriers to entry.


Their motives are the same as any other company...to make money. The upside to MS is that their business strategy is geared toward making computing a commodity product. Commodity products are typically cheaper.


Given that my professional career started during this transition period I cannot imagine a better outcome than what MS has provided for the masses. NONE of the other companies at the time, despite opportunity, did what MS consistently did: drive computing costs down while maintaining a working business model.

Not Atari (dead), not Commodore (dead), not Apple, not IBM, not DEC, not Sun...no one.


The point is that in the hands of any other company it would have been far worse.


Ivory tower experts perhaps. Yes, I've heard it said but not one can point to a better model that gets us to where we are today.


BS. Look at the unix market when it was dominant. A bazillion flavors of unix from a bazillion different vendors and prices were idiotic across the board.


Most things killed themselves. Atari...killed itself. Commodore...killed itself. You forget Dell, Gateway, Micron and the other clone makers. You forget how quickly the cost of computing dropped. You forget how quickly real computing power expanded. Without that common platform we wouldn't have had PC based gaming and the HUGE explosion in GPU capabilities because everyone else had their own homegrown graphics capabilities which absolutely killed SGI and pretty much gave everyone a $25,000 SGI class workstation on their desktop with a $150 graphics card.

We were very lucky to have MS and Gates at that important point in history.

I'm still waiting for something of intrinsic development value to come out of your thought process on being glad Linux runs Flash slow as well.

Both platforms cut down the time to market for both platforms and gives Adobe a broad pool of free QA developers to help them fix this junk.

Always amazes me how many Microsoft/Adobe sympathizers crawl out the woodwork on this forum.

If you include smart phone sales (which any sane mind should) Windows OS dominance is dead within 3 years, and you can hold me to that.

There can't be that little money if they're paying accountants to handle it all! Isn't AI one of the most visited Apple sites? There's a good ammount of advertising (far more than Daring Fireball) being delivered to a key demographic (tech enthusiasts happy to pay for premium products), so I would think revenue is pretty healthy.

And what about these paid webmasters? If they're incapable of developing a mobile version of the site, maybe it's time to hire a new webmaster. Moderators almost never get paid for any forum, so I don't think that's a valid comparison.

Good joke!

Q1.) How many computers are sold worldwide each year? Is the number growing or falling?

Q2.) How many iPhones does Apple sell per year?

A1.) 302.3 million in 2008 (the vast majority of which run Windows). It's growing. IDC predicts 442.3 million in 2012.

A2.) About 16 million.

Are you seriously saying that you expect Apple to be selling hundreds of millions of iPhones a year by 2012? Seriously? Let's remember that they never managed to sell 100 million iPods in a year.

Edit: hmmm, it's late here and I'm getting tired; re-reading your post I guess you're not talking just Apple. So you expect hundreds of millions of non-Microsoft OS smartphones to be sold in 2012? Well, that's possible, I guess.

I'd pay you just to shut up.

You just took back your throne as forum asshat. Now Teckstud is going to have to work harder to regain the title.

You are saying that users are responsible for propping up AI's business model?

How many click-through ads am I supposed to be looking at per day? How many Flash banners with dancing silhouettes advertising toxic mortgages?

I was indeed including Andoid etc in my prediction. However Apple alone will pick up a hefty chunk of that.

Also high volume Apple and Android Netbooks will be out by then as well.

That's a good idea, maybe I should go work for one.

On my own web site, I don't sell advertisements or generate "content", it's a store whose sole purpose is to sell products, there aren't any third party ads. I really can't imagine operating a content-based web site.

The "work" that I do here is basically volunteer with no expression or expectation of payment, I really don't spend more than a minute a day doing the work, the rest of the time I'm here is time I'd waste hanging out here anyway. But there are still expenses and the time input on the part of the site owner that needs to be justified somehow.


I think the fact that it doesn't work on phones really does show a lack of foresight, data phones appear to be shaping up to be the next wave of internet growth, a lack of performance or very poor performance won't serve well. I will grant that the flash sites do look nice, but the functionality is too often lacking. For example, the flash sites that use scroll bars don't work with scroll wheels. The media playback controls vary a lot from site to site.