PianoWow

This is my response to the BS arguments Steve Jobs make here.  I have recreated it here for archiving purposes, knowing Apple won’t keep it on their site forever.

Openness

The only push for openness Apple has been a part of is with products they give away, like Safari.  Everything Apple sells uses proprietary standards.

Full web

Arguing that you’re popular enough to have a dozen websites create special versions of their website for the open standard you support doesn’t justify ignoring all the websites that use flash exclusively.   Yes, vimeo and youtube have the resources to keep two versions of the video on their site, one for computers, another for mobile devices, but a lot of good content providers do not.  And even when sites implement dual-website approach, it is a partial conversion.  The mobile-optimized video is a subset of the video available to computers.  Apple, why are you forcing companies to do more work?

Reliability

Nobody expects flash to be perfect.  A cross-platform solution is always a little buggy.  What about all the unstable apps you approve?  If Apple is going to argue with this against Flash, they should apply it consistently to other third party software that runs on your platform.

Battery Life

Laughable.  Everyone knows video sucks battery life.  What if I’m ok with that?  It’s the end of the night, and I want to watch some online video as I’m falling asleep… what’s the problem, Apple?  Why is my battery so important to you?

Touch

This is really the only compelling reason, in my eyes, against flash on the iphone.  But honestly, can’t they just use long touch or something to simulate mouse-over events?  Isn’t this simply saying “we don’t know how to simulate mouse-over events with a touch screen in an intuitive way,” and acknowledging their platform’s weakness?  Flash isn’t the only thing that uses mouse-over.  It’s all over the web.

Control

App developers want to be able to develop flash applications that they can sell as iphone apps.  Users want to be able to browse flash websites on their iphones.  Adobe wants to sell more licenses for their Flash development software.  But Apple wants control.  So they’re screwing everyone over, including themselves.

Honestly, I actually hope html 5 wins over Flash in this battle, but Apple is being a little too heavy-handed with its approach in supporting html 5.  Apple should develop its website with the html 5 <video> tag and forget about their quicktime plugin, and develop websites that challenge the interactivity of flash.  They should not use their popular development platform to bully Adobe around in an anti-competitive manner.