In the tech world, there is a reoccurring question that gets debated in marketing, design, and engineering departments?backwards compatibility. It goes like this: a company has existing customers / users of its products, and wants / needs to factor these in when making a new revision of an existing platform or product. Take the example of a spark plug?it has to work in your car, since you are not going to throw your car away when you need a new one.
At a recent analyst conference, Apple COO Tim Cook got me thinking about Apple?s take on the subject:
?How do you protect user experience as developers develop products? This is the privilege and curse of technology?at some point, if you include every hardware you?ve ever shipped, you stifle innovation. Because we?ve done this for so long, I feel like we?ve come to a really intelligent conclusion on these each time. I think that?s part of our knowledge and heritage as a platform provider.?
Backward compatibility can create feature bloat and make a product slow and cumbersome. Conversely, it?s really easy to piss people off?not just customers, but complementary services / developers. Backward compatibility can be achieved through emulation (Apple did this moving from PPC to Intel), but it?s not seamless. So how much time should a company spend taking into account the ecosystem, usability issues & concerns of their captive audience / installed base?
The answer depends. Consider APIs (application programming interfaces) as an example. An API can be a liability if designed wrong?constant source of support headaches. APIs also ?capture? customers (they take a long time to learn, and the switching costs are significant). Public APIs are forever ? you can add to them but cannot say ?this call was a mistake? or you will break people?s programs. That?s why, when developing an API, if there is any doubt, good developers omit the feature. Something can always be added later, but it cannot be taken out. Good code is modular and inter-code module ties are effectively APIs. So these same concepts apply broadly to non-public APIs.
The most intelligent companies put incredible strategic thought into what features to include during the architectural and design phase. In general there is an inverse relationship between how feature-rich a product is and its ability to be backward compatible from generation to generation. This is one reason Apple?s products are so minimalistic. This design philospohy keeps feature-bloat in check, and helps platforms to evolve compatibly with the previous generation. This concept also explains why Apple tends to keep a tight control on their platform.
Here are some other examples:
Google Android is already experiencing a lot of fragmentation and backward compatibility issues today ? many of them stem from the platforms 'openness' ? e.g. developers using non-public APIs that they have been repeatedly warned not to do. This has been a big turnoff for Android users. Also, the issue is recursive since differentiation on an ?open platform? like Android encourages designers to differentiate via features, causing more and more fragmentation.
Microsoft is another extreme ? they go to great lengths to appease developers and make Windows work between generations. Dependencies in their code are enormous. By attempting to keep every API going back to Windows 95 (3.1?), even with bug-compatibility, they have a bloated, brittle, heavy platform which ultimately detracts from the user experience. Strategy: make it useful to all ? displease everyone equally.
Intel should be discussed in the context of PCs vs mobile (more on their mobile issues here). The x86 architecture has become a liability for Intel in handsets. RISC/ARM processors (95% share of mobile) are better designed in terms of transistor count, die size, and power consumption. Why? Because Intel added tons of instructions (multimedia/MMX etc) into x86 for PCs?not needed in mobile. That?s why Intel has zero market in mobile, and are trying to catch up using manufacturing scale (process technology) which isn't likely going to cut it.
Apple gets lambasted continually by the press for leaving out features that people 'need'. The reason is intimately tied to their perspective on user experience and backward compatibility. The reality is it takes unbelievable engineering and a vision to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don?t break. Apple has mastered this?it?s part of their DNA and design heritage, and it's why they will likely continue to be a dominant platform company.
The more I read up on this issue, the more sense it makes from a business, design, and innovation perspective.
It makes absolute sense from Apple's point of view. I can understand why someone in Adobe's camp would view it differently, but Adobe's track record for supporting Apple and their customers is known to be worse than bad. Some could argue that Adobe had sufficient cause, but who cares? From Apple's perspective, it is what it is. History shows that Adobe doesn't care about Apple's customers, and it's too late for them to change their stripes.
Apple have stated numerous times publicly that they intend to own the core technologies of their products. The development environment of iPhone is clearly part of that. They have no intention of letting Adobe marginalize iPhone, and Adobe has no legal case in this regard (imo).
I spoke about this a while back. Adobe didn't release Mac updates for almost two years and windows started getting updates first. I remember how peeved avid pro tools was when apple came out with the putchaseof emagics, Logic ans then fcp.
IMHO, I think app is stepping on to many toes as of late. Thus could really get ugly.
Hade. Really nice post Thanking everyone for prayers for my Father thn the iPhone went grey and lost it. Will edit later. He is doing fine and my wife and I and a whole bunch of strangers saved a terrified puppy yesterday. Good night.
Ignore the politics and analyze President Obama's presentation techniques (I've been doing so for a presentation on presentation styles): he uses the same technique whenever he talks about "the other side". He does "the only two choices are mine or some exaggerated other one" -- which makes it sound like what he's doing is the only obvious choice. (That's why Joe Wilson yelled "you lie" in congress).
The fact that Sue identifies with Joe Wilson is very revealing. First, it shows that she is probably not an astroturfer as some have claimed (or at least that she is a very bad one). No astroturfer would needlessly alienate half of the people who might potentially agree with her just to make a political point that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Second, it shows that she is a deeply bitter person, as is Joe Wilson.
Apple's doing well. But if they behaved like they cared about their customers instead of just Steve, they could be doing much better.
Oh how selective you are in your recounting of history, and how extremely skewed your interpretation. When SJ returned to Apple it was a complete train wreck of a company. Failed incoherent strategy piled on top of failed incoherent strategy. You do a nice job of recounting many of those failed incoherent strategies, but without acknowledging (until you were called out on it) that those failures were not due to the current management.
So what was Jobs and his band of Nexties supposed to do? Stick with every single failed incoherent strategy just for the sake of keeping Apple's word to developers? Jobs had to somehow stop the bleeding, slap some lipstick on the pig that was the Mac, and try to keep the company from going out of business. I left the Mac in 1999 because I didn't think he could possibly succeed. PowerPC had proved to be a huge mistake. A small performance edge for a few years followed by a massive performance deficit for many years. The classic Mac OS was a dead end, and Mac OS X (or Rhapsody) was a slow, strange, hybrid of NeXTStep and the classic Mac interface.
Contrast that to Windows PCs at the time -- I built a PC with a dual socket Abit motherboard running two overclocked Celerons and Windows 2000 for a tiny amount of money compared to a Mac at the time. And the Mac at the time was slower, had very little application support from anyone, and seemed to have no future at all. In retrospect, I still think I made the right choice. Those rebuilding years were just downright ugly. Only the hardest core Mac fan could have stuck with Apple during those years.
But come to 2006 with the switch to Intel, and then Leopard following a little after that, and you see that Jobs really did know what he was doing all along. We now have a fast, stable system with a great interface and much more consistency for users and developers. And Apple's Mac sales reflect this massive improvement. I returned to the mac in late 2006. I was tired of all the driver issues, malware, and seeming lack of direction for Windows. I'm glad I did and I think the future looks bright. With Valve bringing Steam to the Mac, we even have hope that real gaming might finally come back to the Mac.
Of course Apple could have still supported XCode AND let Metrowerks live -- Apple had done that with MPW, ThinkC, Borland and Microsoft at the same time before. When Apple doomed PowerPlant, they could have tried to buy it up or support it to keep Apps running, and so on. They could have tried to acquire Metrowerks and borrow some of the Code or design or features that people liked. There were many options. They chose the one that hurt the most developers and Apps (and thus customers) and was the most anti-competitive.
Your thought is so entirely twisted: "They chose the one that hurt the most developers and Apps (and thus customers) and was the most anti-competitive." Normal people, not filled with hate and bitterness, would say, "They did what they had to do to insure the success of their platform and control it's evolution. Metrowerks was an unfortunate victim of circumstances." It's also the case that Apple's choice turned out to be the best one for both it and developers who stuck with them and adopted Xcode. But, all you can see in any Apple action is a motivation to screw someone.
And, BTW, when President Obama is presenting the choices, he's presenting the choices offered by the respective sides: you know, the choices that are actually available to choose from at the moment? It is an interesting rhetorical style to do that and not just present all the logically possible choices available, to restrict himself to the realistically possible choices. You could definitely learn something from him there.
EDIT: On the topic of how twisted around "Sue's" thoughts on this subject are, the other day "Sue" claimed that Apple's corporate style is like communism or socialism. In fact, if you look at it objectively, it seems more like something out of an Ayn Rand novel (which I'm sure it's not based on, more likely Sun Tzu or advice from Larry Ellison than Ayn Rand) than communism. Then, if you take a look at "Sue's" position, it sort of looks like this: "From Apple according to its abilities. To Adobe according to its needs." Funny how that is.
(Yes, I saw the note below when I added this, but it doesn't seem to fall into the "specific politicians and political groups" it was requested we stay clear of and seems entirely relevant -- i.e., it's not a gratuitous political dig -- in the context of the current discussion.)
Even though the political rancor is minor (or almost none) so far, it's best to leave it out in future posts. Naming specific politicians and political groups tend to bring out the kind of person that has their politics on their armband, and as such, become a disruption.
Even though the political rancor is minor so far, it's best to leave it out in future posts. Naming specific politicians and political groups tend to bring out the kind of person that has their politics on their armband, and as such, become a disruption.
Sue, any axes to grind? Just wondering. Apple is justified in not allowing Adobe to marginalize iPhone OS with Flash translations imo. Speaking from an AAPL pov that is..
Not really. Why? Sometimes the facts are the facts.
Certainly that is some people's opinion (especially fanboys that don't understand the software business -- but I'm not saying everyone who does that is. There are very few that have that view despite being informed).
There's just a tradeoff. Does the platform do a little work that saves ALL their developers a ton of time. Or does the platform maker make things harder for all their developers, because it gives them some competitive advantage? There are tradeoff with the decisions. (Quantity and Quality of Apps, versus profits to the platform company).
I could write long missive's about Adobe's many shortcomings. There are certainly a few rabid haters. But that's not what the thread is about, and I'm a pragmatic. What I care about is that my phone can work better. Safari already crashes all over the place. But like it or not, lots of the web uses it. I'd rather that the option of having it, but disabling it. It hurts not a bit to have it, and a ton not to. That lame argument that people would blame the platform is fiction: Steve already warned users -- all they need is a simple button/notification: "Flash crashed Safari" if that was the true reason. So only the small thinkers believe that.
But Air on the other hand, and other abstraction libraries helped the platform. Many of the top apps were in Air. The argument that they're all crap is already proven wrong. Only dim bulbs and sheep argue that all these top apps are suddenly bad because Steve said so. We're losing something. You can be willing to pay that price, but don't pretend that it isn't a loss.
And the argument itself, that abstractions are bad, is the lamest rationalization to come out of Steve's mouth. And he's had some doozies. Software development either assumes that Apple is perfect and knows it all (everyone's business, customer base, problems, etc.) better than they do as software developers as specialists -- a truly laughable point of view -- or that many of them should be able to extend the platform and add value on their own. The latter comes with some risks -- they could get too committed to that codebase, which holds them back, etc. But those same arguments happen without abstraction and ANY large codebase. On top of that, it is usually easier to update abstractions because of the shared burden of a larger customer base -- fix it once, and ALL the apps are updated, instead of having to fix the same thing hundreds of times. So anyone that knows software well, knows the arguments are complete garbage.
Is the truth an axe to grind? Is the fact that I've written more software than Steve Jobs has? No. I just hate stupid and bald-faced lies thrown in my face. All along I've said that Apple can do this. It is their choice. But the lies behind it are as embarrassing as the fanboys are that fail to understand the basic arguments.
can understand why someone in Adobe's camp would view it differently, but Adobe's track record for supporting Apple and their customers is known to be worse than bad.
Why?
Here's the answers I've gotten (ever)
1) Adobe is Lazy, Steve said so. They don't support Cocoa.
Adobe currently ships more pro-Apps that are Cocoa than Apple does. Until 10.6 the Finder was Carbon. Final Cut Pro is still Carbon. iTunes is still Carbon.
Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere, AfterEffects, Acrobat are bigger code bases. They're 64 bit and Cocoa. But Steve says "Adobe is lazy" and his flock starts bleating the same message without a clue.
2) "They killed a few products".
Um, Apple killed far more during the same time.
And why did Adobe kill them? Usually two reasons: (1) They had two competing products after an acquisition or redevelopment and picked the better selling one / newer one to carry forward. (2) Apple changed the code base many times in expensive ways, requiring expensive redevelopment with poor migration tools - pushing costs onto developers and hundreds of companies and products died during that time. Adobe saved most of theirs on the Mac, and stuck it out better than Apple did during that time. But had to let a few go away. Adobe's bad for being less lazy and more committed than Apple was.
3) "Because Flash was buggy, especially before Adobe bought them in 2005".
Ya, that's all Adobe's fault -- now 10.1 the biggest rewrite in their history is coming out. Let's not even see what it is. And the Air Apps were still working well on the iPhone and Apple already had the ability to ban any that crashed or fell below the standards level -- they were often top 10 in their categories. So Adobe is investing more in Apple, and the reward from Apple is to hurt Adobe for the investment.
4) Final Cut is cooler than Adobe products.
Didn't Apple get that from Adobe during the Macromedia acquisition?
Oh how selective you are in your recounting of history, and how extremely skewed your interpretation.
How so?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blastdoor
When SJ returned to Apple it was a complete train wreck of a company.
I know you probably don't know this -- but most of that was radically improved by Gil Amelio. Steve knew that, so stepped in and took credit.
But even so, who cares? It doesn't change the history I'm talking about. Apple was screwed up, and still is (in different ways). All companies are. It doesn't change the facts of what they did -- it just gives it a little context.
Apple was struggling, their market was crashing because they couldn't follow through on a plan. Wether it was Copland or OS X is irrelevant. The former was a better incremental step, the latter was a better revolutionary one. But the market was going down. Apple cut more apps, technology and support than Adobe did. But many fanboys blame Adobe for being one of the few big companies that stuck it out and stayed on the Mac market.
During that time you had things like the PowerPC started stagnating and the Pentium Hardware was getting much better, much quicker. Video pros were all jumping over to PC's, Adobe had an OLD code base in Premiere, and had huge-redevelopment costs for all their platforms because Apple was changing so much. Adobe saved most products and paid for the complete redevelopment and far higher costs than to support Windows for most projects -- but dropped a few like FrameMaker and Premiere. Fanboys were outraged and bitter. But Apple dropped more Apps and technologies, they get a pass. Fair is fair.
Apple wasn't wrong to thin up. But then Adobe wasn't either. Or if Adobe was, then Apple was worse. That's not bitter or selective, that's just a balanced view of both companies. You should try it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blastdoor
Failed incoherent strategy piled on top of failed incoherent strategy. You do a nice job of recounting many of those failed incoherent strategies, but without acknowledging (until you were called out on it) that those failures were not due to the current management.
I didn't think that was relevant. If it was, then Adobe gets a bigger pass -- they've had two to three different CEO's since then. So keep it fair. If Apple gets a pass on everything before Steve, then Adobe gets one one Shantanu. If Adobe doesn't and has to own their whole history, then Apple does too.
Plus, Adobe has killed few products and increased Flash support and other things since they acquired Macromedia. Apple did the worst actions towards developers after Steve came back. So this whole line weakens your case. But seems like a not very well thought out excuse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blastdoor
So what was Jobs and his band of Nexties supposed to do? Stick with every single failed incoherent strategy just for the sake of keeping Apple's word to developers?
Sorry, look at the {Current Sitting President} speech technique again. It isn't a black or white, my way or a stupid alternative. That's a way to hide your own failings, not own and learn from them or offer balance.
Steve could have saved a few technologies. They could have worked with developers. And so on. As mentioned look at Metrowerks example -- how did it hurt Apple to give Metrowerks access to headers as they'd been doing for the prior twenty years to other companies?
It makes no sense if you're looking at "Poor Steve and Apple struggling to make ends meet".
It makes perfect sense if you're looking at it as "Control Freak Steve wants to control the platform completely so kicks out all competing tools, especially superior ones". Even if it hurt developers and customers. Notice any patterns? It doesn't make Apple all bad: but from a customer point of view, I'd rather Apple chips in their fair share and helps developers and their own platform out, than use every opportunity to make it harder for their developers so they can take over their App market.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Blastdoor
But come to 2006 with the switch to Intel, and then Leopard following a little after that, and you see that Jobs really did know what he was doing all along.
I'm not saying the choices were all bad. I'm saying they chose to do them in a way that was the most disruptive and expensive for developers possible. So blaming the developers who ate all those costs and still stuck by the platform for not doing more than Apple was doing, is just stupid and ignorant of the situation.
You can worship Steve or not. But understand software business enough to understand basic risk/reward ratios and Apple's actions have costs.
Imagine you're Adobe and you have a fixed budget and fixed timelines for release. Jobs hits you with things like change from highly productive CodeWarrior to the far less efficient XCode, move from PPC to x86, and from 32 bit to 64 bit Carbon (then we'll pull it away after you're a year into the port), and Apple was saying they were completely committed to Carbon (until like 2007 WWDC) so at some time in the future you might want to move Carbon to Cocoa, even though Apple's own Apps haven't moved over, it is still buggy and a subset of functionality, and it offers negative value to your customers. (The only thing they get is new bugs for the transition).
Adobe was so busy chasing Apple's changes and spending more on Mac development than Windows. So Adobe couldn't get to Cocoa as fast as they would have liked. Ignorant fanboys blame Adobe, and don't even understand the whole other side of software development. They see the problem as Adobe and other ISV's didn't get screwed enough by Apple. The ISV's are thinking my costs are already 2-4 times higher supporting the Mac for less marketshare and a bunch of negative PR every time Steve Jobs opens his mouth. Should we just go away? They don't -- but get grief from the Mac community for being more loyal to Mac customer than Apple is. (But most of Apple's bad moves are camouflaged under some lame excuse that the fanboys buy).
I view many pages on the BBC site every day. There are many, many video clips that use Flash - including their News streaming service. I'd like to get an iPad, but the BBC site would be a no go area on an iPad, so that's making me hesitate.
Even AppleInsider currently has 4 or 5 Flash video clips on its front page.
Does anyone else find a tad embarrassing the Apple 'iPad Ready' website that listis websites that use HTML5? There you'll see some two dozen websites...two dozen out of millions! And of those two dozen, many use Flash elsewhere other than their Home page.
I'm all for HTML5, but why intentionally cripple the User experience over the next year or two while the standard takes a foothold? Why not give the User the option of switching Flash on or off?
Take BMW cars for example. People have a choice of whether to use top quality expensive BMW footmats or poorer, duller, generic ones. What if BMW insisted that purchasers of BMWs only use BMW footmats? Sure that would make ALL BMWs look swank, but it would reduce the number of BMW purchasers somewhat.
Apple wants people to only be able to buy Apple-authorised software so that whenever anyone uses an iPad/iPhone the software will, allegedly, perform better and perhaps look that much more polished. This may be true, but there is a Trade-off between a relatively few great 'authorised' apps and a great number of good, and nicely acceptable apps.
Isn't it possible that Adobe have a worthy Flash version as of 10.1? Forget about previous versions, what's on the table now? If Apple is insisting upon HTML5 NOW it should really develop tools to make it easy to port Flash to HTML5. But isn't that effectively what Adobe has done with CS5?
I'm a long term Apple User, but I must say that viewing a crippled web on my iPhone is a pain.
Safari already crashes all over the place. But like it or not, lots of the web uses it. I'd rather that the option of having it, but disabling it. It hurts not a bit to have it, and a ton not to. That lame argument that people would blame the platform is fiction: Steve already warned users -- all they need is a simple button/notification: "Flash crashed Safari" if that was the true reason. So only the small thinkers believe that.
Sorry I think that and I don't like to be called a small thinker.
Since my switch to the Mac the Flash plugin was the No1 in my crash-logs.
It also caused my Macs to ramp up the fans in a way that I hardly experienced even on hot compilation or video-cutting sessions.
You simply can't deny my experience. I might draw wrong conclusions of things a experience but the personal experience like my feelings are mine!
So please don't try to regulate how I have to feel and think.
BTW: I use ClickToFlash as my current "solution".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sue Denim
And the argument itself, that abstractions are bad, is the lamest rationalization to come out of Steve's mouth. And he's had some doozies. Software development either assumes that Apple is perfect and knows it all (everyone's business, customer base, problems, etc.) better than they do as software developers as specialists -- a truly laughable point of view -- or that many of them should be able to extend the platform and add value on their own. The latter comes with some risks -- they could get too committed to that codebase, which holds them back, etc. But those same arguments happen without abstraction and ANY large codebase. On top of that, it is usually easier to update abstractions because of the shared burden of a larger customer base -- fix it once, and ALL the apps are updated, instead of having to fix the same thing hundreds of times. So anyone that knows software well, knows the arguments are complete garbage.
I can't recall that Steve discredited abstraction as development technique in general. He seems not to like the "flash-way" because of bad experience. A lot of devs and admins I know judge flash as a threat to QA and security in the past. So some critics are justified.
To be honest §3.3.1 isn't so easy to judge and leaves some room for speculation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sue Denim
Is the truth an axe to grind? Is the fact that I've written more software than Steve Jobs has? No. I just hate stupid and bald-faced lies thrown in my face. All along I've said that Apple can do this. It is their choice. But the lies behind it are as embarrassing as the fanboys are that fail to understand the basic arguments.
I guess it's possible that I have written more software than You.
Would this qualify me to say that I a had a lot of trouble with flash and the Adobe Updater for my CS3 in the past or is this just a lie thrown on Your face?
I hope that CS5 is really is as good as it seems to be.
If, I'll buy the update and will have a another closer look on Air.
I have no big AS code base, so I can wait and see.
I know you probably don't know this -- but most of that was radically improved by Gil Amelio. Steve knew that, so stepped in and took credit.
There you go again, Sue. You just lost what tiny bit of credibility you might have had. This assertion is so far from the truth, that one wonders if you were in a coma in those years. Gil Amelio had Apple on a collision course with death. The only credit he can possibly be given for saving Apple is giving the green light on the NeXT acquisition.
Since my switch to the Mac the Flash plugin was the No1 in my crash-logs.
I don't doubt that. I have some problems with Flash too.
Here's the issues:
1) It costs more to develop on Mac than Windows. This is made worse by many of Apple's choices. If you devote equal budget to a smaller market, you'll fall behind on Macs. Whose fault is that?
2) Microsoft is more open and helpful overall. Period. If Flash is a superior experience on Windows, do you think Apple owns any part of that?
3) Do you think all of the crashes in Flash are Adobe's fault? Do you think some might fall down to bugginess poor documentation or support in the OS? Safari crashes just fine without Flash. Many times Flash gets blamed for things that aren't its' fault. But there are plenty that are its fault. Right now, fanboys blame Flash 100% and Apple 0%. Truth, probably more like 60/40 or 70/30. But Adobe does a major reinvestment to fix things, and Apple punishes them in a rather petty way. What do you think this does for Adobe and others future motivations towards Apple?
4) Many hate Flash because of Ads. I don't. I understand the business. Advertising pays for editorial. Period. Because of Flash ads I get more content for free. If you cut down on the revenue publishers make (or increase their costs like with HTML5 right now), I lose free editorial, they cut staff or cut quality. It's just economics.
Is Flash too buggy? Yes.
Is Mac OS or Safari too buggy? Yes.
Is Flash often a victim of Apple's bugs? Yes.
Is Flash too slow at finding and fixing bugs on Mac? Yes.
Is Microsoft much more helpful in doing the same on Windows? Yes.
Has Apple made it much harder to write good software on Macs? Yes.
You can choose to see only the pro-Apple or anti-Adobe statements. But the world is a lot more mixed.
You can hate Flash. You can turn it off or not load it. I don't care. What I care about it claiming that lies are the truth. Mac fans ignore that at least some of the problems with Flash or all software on Macs is at least partly Apple's fault.
There you go again, Sue. You just lost what tiny bit of credibility you might have had. This assertion is so far from the truth, that one wonders if you were in a coma in those years. Gil Amelio had Apple on a collision course with death. The only credit he can possibly be given for saving Apple is giving the green light on the NeXT acquisition.
Spoken like someone who has never read a 10-K or 10-Q. Gil was an operations guy. He got the operations in order, hiring/firing and restructuring, remember the iMac was developed under him. Etc.
Of all the decisions made by him the NeXT acquisition was the best and the worst. Fanboys will only look at the good they got, and not the costs or what they could have done without NeXT. But this isn't really the main topic.
Comments
http://stevecheney.posterous.com/bac...vation-why-app
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In the tech world, there is a reoccurring question that gets debated in marketing, design, and engineering departments?backwards compatibility. It goes like this: a company has existing customers / users of its products, and wants / needs to factor these in when making a new revision of an existing platform or product. Take the example of a spark plug?it has to work in your car, since you are not going to throw your car away when you need a new one.
At a recent analyst conference, Apple COO Tim Cook got me thinking about Apple?s take on the subject:
?How do you protect user experience as developers develop products? This is the privilege and curse of technology?at some point, if you include every hardware you?ve ever shipped, you stifle innovation. Because we?ve done this for so long, I feel like we?ve come to a really intelligent conclusion on these each time. I think that?s part of our knowledge and heritage as a platform provider.?
Backward compatibility can create feature bloat and make a product slow and cumbersome. Conversely, it?s really easy to piss people off?not just customers, but complementary services / developers. Backward compatibility can be achieved through emulation (Apple did this moving from PPC to Intel), but it?s not seamless. So how much time should a company spend taking into account the ecosystem, usability issues & concerns of their captive audience / installed base?
The answer depends. Consider APIs (application programming interfaces) as an example. An API can be a liability if designed wrong?constant source of support headaches. APIs also ?capture? customers (they take a long time to learn, and the switching costs are significant). Public APIs are forever ? you can add to them but cannot say ?this call was a mistake? or you will break people?s programs. That?s why, when developing an API, if there is any doubt, good developers omit the feature. Something can always be added later, but it cannot be taken out. Good code is modular and inter-code module ties are effectively APIs. So these same concepts apply broadly to non-public APIs.
The most intelligent companies put incredible strategic thought into what features to include during the architectural and design phase. In general there is an inverse relationship between how feature-rich a product is and its ability to be backward compatible from generation to generation. This is one reason Apple?s products are so minimalistic. This design philospohy keeps feature-bloat in check, and helps platforms to evolve compatibly with the previous generation. This concept also explains why Apple tends to keep a tight control on their platform.
Here are some other examples:
Google Android is already experiencing a lot of fragmentation and backward compatibility issues today ? many of them stem from the platforms 'openness' ? e.g. developers using non-public APIs that they have been repeatedly warned not to do. This has been a big turnoff for Android users. Also, the issue is recursive since differentiation on an ?open platform? like Android encourages designers to differentiate via features, causing more and more fragmentation.
Microsoft is another extreme ? they go to great lengths to appease developers and make Windows work between generations. Dependencies in their code are enormous. By attempting to keep every API going back to Windows 95 (3.1?), even with bug-compatibility, they have a bloated, brittle, heavy platform which ultimately detracts from the user experience. Strategy: make it useful to all ? displease everyone equally.
Intel should be discussed in the context of PCs vs mobile (more on their mobile issues here). The x86 architecture has become a liability for Intel in handsets. RISC/ARM processors (95% share of mobile) are better designed in terms of transistor count, die size, and power consumption. Why? Because Intel added tons of instructions (multimedia/MMX etc) into x86 for PCs?not needed in mobile. That?s why Intel has zero market in mobile, and are trying to catch up using manufacturing scale (process technology) which isn't likely going to cut it.
Apple gets lambasted continually by the press for leaving out features that people 'need'. The reason is intimately tied to their perspective on user experience and backward compatibility. The reality is it takes unbelievable engineering and a vision to move a platform forward while at the same time making sure things don?t break. Apple has mastered this?it?s part of their DNA and design heritage, and it's why they will likely continue to be a dominant platform company.
Apple is justified in not allowing Adobe to marginalize iPhone OS with Flash translations imo. Speaking from an AAPL pov that is..
I thought this article was rather interesting...it came out before the whole Section 3.3.1. hubabaloo.
http://stevecheney.posterous.com/bac...vation-why-app
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I.
Excellent post.
Sue, any axes to grind? Just wondering.
Apple is justified in not allowing Adobe to marginalize iPhone OS with Flash translations imo. Speaking from an AAPL pov that is..
The more I read up on this issue, the more sense it makes from a business, design, and innovation perspective.
Roughly Drafted has an article the made me laugh.
Chronicles of Conflict: the History of Adobe vs. Apple
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/0...dobe-vs-apple/
I'm not sure about all the facts etc. but still hilarious.
That is hilarious!
The more I read up on this issue, the more sense it makes from a business, design, and innovation perspective.
It makes absolute sense from Apple's point of view. I can understand why someone in Adobe's camp would view it differently, but Adobe's track record for supporting Apple and their customers is known to be worse than bad. Some could argue that Adobe had sufficient cause, but who cares? From Apple's perspective, it is what it is. History shows that Adobe doesn't care about Apple's customers, and it's too late for them to change their stripes.
Apple have stated numerous times publicly that they intend to own the core technologies of their products. The development environment of iPhone is clearly part of that. They have no intention of letting Adobe marginalize iPhone, and Adobe has no legal case in this regard (imo).
IMHO, I think app is stepping on to many toes as of late. Thus could really get ugly.
Hade. Really nice post Thanking everyone for prayers for my Father thn the iPhone went grey and lost it. Will edit later. He is doing fine and my wife and I and a whole bunch of strangers saved a terrified puppy yesterday. Good night.
Sorry. It seemed relevant to me.
Ignore the politics and analyze President Obama's presentation techniques (I've been doing so for a presentation on presentation styles): he uses the same technique whenever he talks about "the other side". He does "the only two choices are mine or some exaggerated other one" -- which makes it sound like what he's doing is the only obvious choice. (That's why Joe Wilson yelled "you lie" in congress).
The fact that Sue identifies with Joe Wilson is very revealing. First, it shows that she is probably not an astroturfer as some have claimed (or at least that she is a very bad one). No astroturfer would needlessly alienate half of the people who might potentially agree with her just to make a political point that has nothing to do with the discussion at hand.
Second, it shows that she is a deeply bitter person, as is Joe Wilson.
Apple's doing well. But if they behaved like they cared about their customers instead of just Steve, they could be doing much better.
Oh how selective you are in your recounting of history, and how extremely skewed your interpretation. When SJ returned to Apple it was a complete train wreck of a company. Failed incoherent strategy piled on top of failed incoherent strategy. You do a nice job of recounting many of those failed incoherent strategies, but without acknowledging (until you were called out on it) that those failures were not due to the current management.
So what was Jobs and his band of Nexties supposed to do? Stick with every single failed incoherent strategy just for the sake of keeping Apple's word to developers? Jobs had to somehow stop the bleeding, slap some lipstick on the pig that was the Mac, and try to keep the company from going out of business. I left the Mac in 1999 because I didn't think he could possibly succeed. PowerPC had proved to be a huge mistake. A small performance edge for a few years followed by a massive performance deficit for many years. The classic Mac OS was a dead end, and Mac OS X (or Rhapsody) was a slow, strange, hybrid of NeXTStep and the classic Mac interface.
Contrast that to Windows PCs at the time -- I built a PC with a dual socket Abit motherboard running two overclocked Celerons and Windows 2000 for a tiny amount of money compared to a Mac at the time. And the Mac at the time was slower, had very little application support from anyone, and seemed to have no future at all. In retrospect, I still think I made the right choice. Those rebuilding years were just downright ugly. Only the hardest core Mac fan could have stuck with Apple during those years.
But come to 2006 with the switch to Intel, and then Leopard following a little after that, and you see that Jobs really did know what he was doing all along. We now have a fast, stable system with a great interface and much more consistency for users and developers. And Apple's Mac sales reflect this massive improvement. I returned to the mac in late 2006. I was tired of all the driver issues, malware, and seeming lack of direction for Windows. I'm glad I did and I think the future looks bright. With Valve bringing Steam to the Mac, we even have hope that real gaming might finally come back to the Mac.
Of course Apple could have still supported XCode AND let Metrowerks live -- Apple had done that with MPW, ThinkC, Borland and Microsoft at the same time before. When Apple doomed PowerPlant, they could have tried to buy it up or support it to keep Apps running, and so on. They could have tried to acquire Metrowerks and borrow some of the Code or design or features that people liked. There were many options. They chose the one that hurt the most developers and Apps (and thus customers) and was the most anti-competitive.
Your thought is so entirely twisted: "They chose the one that hurt the most developers and Apps (and thus customers) and was the most anti-competitive." Normal people, not filled with hate and bitterness, would say, "They did what they had to do to insure the success of their platform and control it's evolution. Metrowerks was an unfortunate victim of circumstances." It's also the case that Apple's choice turned out to be the best one for both it and developers who stuck with them and adopted Xcode. But, all you can see in any Apple action is a motivation to screw someone.
And, BTW, when President Obama is presenting the choices, he's presenting the choices offered by the respective sides: you know, the choices that are actually available to choose from at the moment? It is an interesting rhetorical style to do that and not just present all the logically possible choices available, to restrict himself to the realistically possible choices. You could definitely learn something from him there.
EDIT: On the topic of how twisted around "Sue's" thoughts on this subject are, the other day "Sue" claimed that Apple's corporate style is like communism or socialism. In fact, if you look at it objectively, it seems more like something out of an Ayn Rand novel (which I'm sure it's not based on, more likely Sun Tzu or advice from Larry Ellison than Ayn Rand) than communism. Then, if you take a look at "Sue's" position, it sort of looks like this: "From Apple according to its abilities. To Adobe according to its needs." Funny how that is.
(Yes, I saw the note below when I added this, but it doesn't seem to fall into the "specific politicians and political groups" it was requested we stay clear of and seems entirely relevant -- i.e., it's not a gratuitous political dig -- in the context of the current discussion.)
Even though the political rancor is minor so far, it's best to leave it out in future posts. Naming specific politicians and political groups tend to bring out the kind of person that has their politics on their armband, and as such, become a disruption.
I strongly agree with this.
Sue, any axes to grind? Just wondering. Apple is justified in not allowing Adobe to marginalize iPhone OS with Flash translations imo. Speaking from an AAPL pov that is..
Not really. Why? Sometimes the facts are the facts.
Certainly that is some people's opinion (especially fanboys that don't understand the software business -- but I'm not saying everyone who does that is. There are very few that have that view despite being informed).
There's just a tradeoff. Does the platform do a little work that saves ALL their developers a ton of time. Or does the platform maker make things harder for all their developers, because it gives them some competitive advantage? There are tradeoff with the decisions. (Quantity and Quality of Apps, versus profits to the platform company).
I could write long missive's about Adobe's many shortcomings. There are certainly a few rabid haters. But that's not what the thread is about, and I'm a pragmatic. What I care about is that my phone can work better. Safari already crashes all over the place. But like it or not, lots of the web uses it. I'd rather that the option of having it, but disabling it. It hurts not a bit to have it, and a ton not to. That lame argument that people would blame the platform is fiction: Steve already warned users -- all they need is a simple button/notification: "Flash crashed Safari" if that was the true reason. So only the small thinkers believe that.
But Air on the other hand, and other abstraction libraries helped the platform. Many of the top apps were in Air. The argument that they're all crap is already proven wrong. Only dim bulbs and sheep argue that all these top apps are suddenly bad because Steve said so. We're losing something. You can be willing to pay that price, but don't pretend that it isn't a loss.
And the argument itself, that abstractions are bad, is the lamest rationalization to come out of Steve's mouth. And he's had some doozies. Software development either assumes that Apple is perfect and knows it all (everyone's business, customer base, problems, etc.) better than they do as software developers as specialists -- a truly laughable point of view -- or that many of them should be able to extend the platform and add value on their own. The latter comes with some risks -- they could get too committed to that codebase, which holds them back, etc. But those same arguments happen without abstraction and ANY large codebase. On top of that, it is usually easier to update abstractions because of the shared burden of a larger customer base -- fix it once, and ALL the apps are updated, instead of having to fix the same thing hundreds of times. So anyone that knows software well, knows the arguments are complete garbage.
Is the truth an axe to grind? Is the fact that I've written more software than Steve Jobs has? No. I just hate stupid and bald-faced lies thrown in my face. All along I've said that Apple can do this. It is their choice. But the lies behind it are as embarrassing as the fanboys are that fail to understand the basic arguments.
can understand why someone in Adobe's camp would view it differently, but Adobe's track record for supporting Apple and their customers is known to be worse than bad.
Why?
Here's the answers I've gotten (ever)
1) Adobe is Lazy, Steve said so. They don't support Cocoa.
Adobe currently ships more pro-Apps that are Cocoa than Apple does. Until 10.6 the Finder was Carbon. Final Cut Pro is still Carbon. iTunes is still Carbon.
Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere, AfterEffects, Acrobat are bigger code bases. They're 64 bit and Cocoa. But Steve says "Adobe is lazy" and his flock starts bleating the same message without a clue.
2) "They killed a few products".
Um, Apple killed far more during the same time.
And why did Adobe kill them? Usually two reasons: (1) They had two competing products after an acquisition or redevelopment and picked the better selling one / newer one to carry forward. (2) Apple changed the code base many times in expensive ways, requiring expensive redevelopment with poor migration tools - pushing costs onto developers and hundreds of companies and products died during that time. Adobe saved most of theirs on the Mac, and stuck it out better than Apple did during that time. But had to let a few go away. Adobe's bad for being less lazy and more committed than Apple was.
3) "Because Flash was buggy, especially before Adobe bought them in 2005".
Ya, that's all Adobe's fault -- now 10.1 the biggest rewrite in their history is coming out. Let's not even see what it is. And the Air Apps were still working well on the iPhone and Apple already had the ability to ban any that crashed or fell below the standards level -- they were often top 10 in their categories. So Adobe is investing more in Apple, and the reward from Apple is to hurt Adobe for the investment.
4) Final Cut is cooler than Adobe products.
Didn't Apple get that from Adobe during the Macromedia acquisition?
Oh how selective you are in your recounting of history, and how extremely skewed your interpretation.
How so?
When SJ returned to Apple it was a complete train wreck of a company.
I know you probably don't know this -- but most of that was radically improved by Gil Amelio. Steve knew that, so stepped in and took credit.
But even so, who cares? It doesn't change the history I'm talking about. Apple was screwed up, and still is (in different ways). All companies are. It doesn't change the facts of what they did -- it just gives it a little context.
Apple was struggling, their market was crashing because they couldn't follow through on a plan. Wether it was Copland or OS X is irrelevant. The former was a better incremental step, the latter was a better revolutionary one. But the market was going down. Apple cut more apps, technology and support than Adobe did. But many fanboys blame Adobe for being one of the few big companies that stuck it out and stayed on the Mac market.
During that time you had things like the PowerPC started stagnating and the Pentium Hardware was getting much better, much quicker. Video pros were all jumping over to PC's, Adobe had an OLD code base in Premiere, and had huge-redevelopment costs for all their platforms because Apple was changing so much. Adobe saved most products and paid for the complete redevelopment and far higher costs than to support Windows for most projects -- but dropped a few like FrameMaker and Premiere. Fanboys were outraged and bitter. But Apple dropped more Apps and technologies, they get a pass. Fair is fair.
Apple wasn't wrong to thin up. But then Adobe wasn't either. Or if Adobe was, then Apple was worse. That's not bitter or selective, that's just a balanced view of both companies. You should try it.
Failed incoherent strategy piled on top of failed incoherent strategy. You do a nice job of recounting many of those failed incoherent strategies, but without acknowledging (until you were called out on it) that those failures were not due to the current management.
I didn't think that was relevant. If it was, then Adobe gets a bigger pass -- they've had two to three different CEO's since then. So keep it fair. If Apple gets a pass on everything before Steve, then Adobe gets one one Shantanu. If Adobe doesn't and has to own their whole history, then Apple does too.
Plus, Adobe has killed few products and increased Flash support and other things since they acquired Macromedia. Apple did the worst actions towards developers after Steve came back. So this whole line weakens your case. But seems like a not very well thought out excuse.
So what was Jobs and his band of Nexties supposed to do? Stick with every single failed incoherent strategy just for the sake of keeping Apple's word to developers?
Sorry, look at the {Current Sitting President} speech technique again. It isn't a black or white, my way or a stupid alternative. That's a way to hide your own failings, not own and learn from them or offer balance.
Steve could have saved a few technologies. They could have worked with developers. And so on. As mentioned look at Metrowerks example -- how did it hurt Apple to give Metrowerks access to headers as they'd been doing for the prior twenty years to other companies?
It makes no sense if you're looking at "Poor Steve and Apple struggling to make ends meet".
It makes perfect sense if you're looking at it as "Control Freak Steve wants to control the platform completely so kicks out all competing tools, especially superior ones". Even if it hurt developers and customers. Notice any patterns? It doesn't make Apple all bad: but from a customer point of view, I'd rather Apple chips in their fair share and helps developers and their own platform out, than use every opportunity to make it harder for their developers so they can take over their App market.
But come to 2006 with the switch to Intel, and then Leopard following a little after that, and you see that Jobs really did know what he was doing all along.
I'm not saying the choices were all bad. I'm saying they chose to do them in a way that was the most disruptive and expensive for developers possible. So blaming the developers who ate all those costs and still stuck by the platform for not doing more than Apple was doing, is just stupid and ignorant of the situation.
You can worship Steve or not. But understand software business enough to understand basic risk/reward ratios and Apple's actions have costs.
Imagine you're Adobe and you have a fixed budget and fixed timelines for release. Jobs hits you with things like change from highly productive CodeWarrior to the far less efficient XCode, move from PPC to x86, and from 32 bit to 64 bit Carbon (then we'll pull it away after you're a year into the port), and Apple was saying they were completely committed to Carbon (until like 2007 WWDC) so at some time in the future you might want to move Carbon to Cocoa, even though Apple's own Apps haven't moved over, it is still buggy and a subset of functionality, and it offers negative value to your customers. (The only thing they get is new bugs for the transition).
Adobe was so busy chasing Apple's changes and spending more on Mac development than Windows. So Adobe couldn't get to Cocoa as fast as they would have liked. Ignorant fanboys blame Adobe, and don't even understand the whole other side of software development. They see the problem as Adobe and other ISV's didn't get screwed enough by Apple. The ISV's are thinking my costs are already 2-4 times higher supporting the Mac for less marketshare and a bunch of negative PR every time Steve Jobs opens his mouth. Should we just go away? They don't -- but get grief from the Mac community for being more loyal to Mac customer than Apple is. (But most of Apple's bad moves are camouflaged under some lame excuse that the fanboys buy).
Even AppleInsider currently has 4 or 5 Flash video clips on its front page.
Does anyone else find a tad embarrassing the Apple 'iPad Ready' website that listis websites that use HTML5? There you'll see some two dozen websites...two dozen out of millions! And of those two dozen, many use Flash elsewhere other than their Home page.
I'm all for HTML5, but why intentionally cripple the User experience over the next year or two while the standard takes a foothold? Why not give the User the option of switching Flash on or off?
Take BMW cars for example. People have a choice of whether to use top quality expensive BMW footmats or poorer, duller, generic ones. What if BMW insisted that purchasers of BMWs only use BMW footmats? Sure that would make ALL BMWs look swank, but it would reduce the number of BMW purchasers somewhat.
Apple wants people to only be able to buy Apple-authorised software so that whenever anyone uses an iPad/iPhone the software will, allegedly, perform better and perhaps look that much more polished. This may be true, but there is a Trade-off between a relatively few great 'authorised' apps and a great number of good, and nicely acceptable apps.
Isn't it possible that Adobe have a worthy Flash version as of 10.1? Forget about previous versions, what's on the table now? If Apple is insisting upon HTML5 NOW it should really develop tools to make it easy to port Flash to HTML5. But isn't that effectively what Adobe has done with CS5?
I'm a long term Apple User, but I must say that viewing a crippled web on my iPhone is a pain.
Safari already crashes all over the place. But like it or not, lots of the web uses it. I'd rather that the option of having it, but disabling it. It hurts not a bit to have it, and a ton not to. That lame argument that people would blame the platform is fiction: Steve already warned users -- all they need is a simple button/notification: "Flash crashed Safari" if that was the true reason. So only the small thinkers believe that.
Sorry I think that and I don't like to be called a small thinker.
Since my switch to the Mac the Flash plugin was the No1 in my crash-logs.
It also caused my Macs to ramp up the fans in a way that I hardly experienced even on hot compilation or video-cutting sessions.
You simply can't deny my experience. I might draw wrong conclusions of things a experience but the personal experience like my feelings are mine!
So please don't try to regulate how I have to feel and think.
BTW: I use ClickToFlash as my current "solution".
And the argument itself, that abstractions are bad, is the lamest rationalization to come out of Steve's mouth. And he's had some doozies. Software development either assumes that Apple is perfect and knows it all (everyone's business, customer base, problems, etc.) better than they do as software developers as specialists -- a truly laughable point of view -- or that many of them should be able to extend the platform and add value on their own. The latter comes with some risks -- they could get too committed to that codebase, which holds them back, etc. But those same arguments happen without abstraction and ANY large codebase. On top of that, it is usually easier to update abstractions because of the shared burden of a larger customer base -- fix it once, and ALL the apps are updated, instead of having to fix the same thing hundreds of times. So anyone that knows software well, knows the arguments are complete garbage.
I can't recall that Steve discredited abstraction as development technique in general. He seems not to like the "flash-way" because of bad experience. A lot of devs and admins I know judge flash as a threat to QA and security in the past. So some critics are justified.
To be honest §3.3.1 isn't so easy to judge and leaves some room for speculation.
Is the truth an axe to grind? Is the fact that I've written more software than Steve Jobs has? No. I just hate stupid and bald-faced lies thrown in my face. All along I've said that Apple can do this. It is their choice. But the lies behind it are as embarrassing as the fanboys are that fail to understand the basic arguments.
I guess it's possible that I have written more software than You.
Would this qualify me to say that I a had a lot of trouble with flash and the Adobe Updater for my CS3 in the past or is this just a lie thrown on Your face?
I hope that CS5 is really is as good as it seems to be.
If, I'll buy the update and will have a another closer look on Air.
I have no big AS code base, so I can wait and see.
I know you probably don't know this -- but most of that was radically improved by Gil Amelio. Steve knew that, so stepped in and took credit.
There you go again, Sue. You just lost what tiny bit of credibility you might have had. This assertion is so far from the truth, that one wonders if you were in a coma in those years. Gil Amelio had Apple on a collision course with death. The only credit he can possibly be given for saving Apple is giving the green light on the NeXT acquisition.
Since my switch to the Mac the Flash plugin was the No1 in my crash-logs.
I don't doubt that. I have some problems with Flash too.
Here's the issues:
1) It costs more to develop on Mac than Windows. This is made worse by many of Apple's choices. If you devote equal budget to a smaller market, you'll fall behind on Macs. Whose fault is that?
2) Microsoft is more open and helpful overall. Period. If Flash is a superior experience on Windows, do you think Apple owns any part of that?
3) Do you think all of the crashes in Flash are Adobe's fault? Do you think some might fall down to bugginess poor documentation or support in the OS? Safari crashes just fine without Flash. Many times Flash gets blamed for things that aren't its' fault. But there are plenty that are its fault. Right now, fanboys blame Flash 100% and Apple 0%. Truth, probably more like 60/40 or 70/30. But Adobe does a major reinvestment to fix things, and Apple punishes them in a rather petty way. What do you think this does for Adobe and others future motivations towards Apple?
4) Many hate Flash because of Ads. I don't. I understand the business. Advertising pays for editorial. Period. Because of Flash ads I get more content for free. If you cut down on the revenue publishers make (or increase their costs like with HTML5 right now), I lose free editorial, they cut staff or cut quality. It's just economics.
Is Flash too buggy? Yes.
Is Mac OS or Safari too buggy? Yes.
Is Flash often a victim of Apple's bugs? Yes.
Is Flash too slow at finding and fixing bugs on Mac? Yes.
Is Microsoft much more helpful in doing the same on Windows? Yes.
Has Apple made it much harder to write good software on Macs? Yes.
You can choose to see only the pro-Apple or anti-Adobe statements. But the world is a lot more mixed.
You can hate Flash. You can turn it off or not load it. I don't care. What I care about it claiming that lies are the truth. Mac fans ignore that at least some of the problems with Flash or all software on Macs is at least partly Apple's fault.
There you go again, Sue. You just lost what tiny bit of credibility you might have had. This assertion is so far from the truth, that one wonders if you were in a coma in those years. Gil Amelio had Apple on a collision course with death. The only credit he can possibly be given for saving Apple is giving the green light on the NeXT acquisition.
Spoken like someone who has never read a 10-K or 10-Q. Gil was an operations guy. He got the operations in order, hiring/firing and restructuring, remember the iMac was developed under him. Etc.
Of all the decisions made by him the NeXT acquisition was the best and the worst. Fanboys will only look at the good they got, and not the costs or what they could have done without NeXT. But this isn't really the main topic.