Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/adobe-ad-apple/

by ashish_0x90 • 16 years ago

87 47 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

FreeRadical• 16 years ago

I thinnk it's meant to say 'We heart Apple', not love.

jbrun• 16 years ago

I must say that this is pretty damn accurate. Not much else to add.

bballant• 16 years ago

It is probably out of scope for the article, or maybe too much on the opinion side, but the Flash developer experience is pretty horrendous.

There are too many ways to mix UI created code, time-line/movie clip stuff, and actual ActionScript code. It can make for some nightmare projects. At least this was the case a couple of years ago when I unconditionally stopped working in Flash.

XCode is not perfect by any means, but way better than flash. It finds the right balance between interface building in a GUI and straight-up coding. Objective-C can be weird, but less weird than ActionScript. Oh, and XCode is free.

So, regardless of the business side, or even the end user experience side, I (and I think most developers) would choose XCode and Objective-C over Flash and ActionScript.

JBiserkov• 16 years ago

XCode is free just like IE is free: a free add-on on overpriced product.

raganwald5• 16 years ago

The crux argument is surprisingly cogent: Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion, the one mechanism that has never been shown to work in the past.

I think there's a huge amount of opportunity for Adobe here. Application development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever.

Pushing Flash because it's a dominant player in a legacy market is a little like going back to 1995 and arguing that people ought to be able to make web servers in PowerBuilder because that's the language everyone is using for business applications.

Adobe doesn't call me up and tell me how to write software, so I'm loathe to tell them what to do. I'll just say that it would be incredibly cool if they went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices.

josefresco• 16 years ago

"Adobe doesn't call me up and tell me how to write software"

Apple might though.

raganwald5• 16 years ago

They told me to write web applications using open and free standards, and I listened.

Some other people called them up and begged to be chained to the oars of a proprietary slave galley, and they told them that if they wanted to be slaves they had to be Apple's slaves and not Adobe's slaves.

Many of these people are happy and well-fed, so I have no quarrel with their choice. But I point out that it's their choice and Apple have offered each and every one of us the right to write free applications for iPhone and iPad.

alec2• 16 years ago

"Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion."

They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell, there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.

gaius2• 16 years ago

But then how's there a YouTube player on the iPad? Something doesn't add up.

ashish_0x902• 16 years ago

From the article: "When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, had there been a great, lightweight version of Flash for mobile devices, .... It was no sure thing that this device would succeed at the time, and giving it every chance to (by including something like Flash) would have made sense. But there was no version of Flash ready that would run on the device (presumably without massive performance/battery hits)."

There were the obvious performance problems, which caused apple not to support flash in iphone.

They sure have a "killer" product(which has worked for them this far), but html5 support by websites is increasing everyday. This is probably because not only it's natively supported and doesn't need a external plugin to run, but overall experience is much better than flash itself.

I think there is not much that adobe can do now to stop this but get along and write great tools for html5 itself.

raganwald5• 16 years ago

Perhaps we are using the phrase killer product in different ways. When I use it, I don't mean that it's popular, I mean that it's so desirable to its customers that they subordinate all other considerations to it.

For example, Visicalc was a killer product: People bought computers to run Visicalc, rather than buying a spreadsheet to run on their computers. PageMaker was a killer product: People bought Macs to run PageMaker rather than choosing a desktop publishing program to run on their Macs.

For all its ubiquity, Flash is not a killer product outside of the video delivery realm: People obviously do not choose a phone to run their Flash games, and developers seem fine learning an entirely new language (Objective C) and framework (Cocoa) to build iPhone applications.

Flash is a killer product in exactly the same sense that J2EE is a killer product.

Tamerlin• 16 years ago

Sure, it's ubiquitous... but it's also nearly as cruft-laden as Java, and the Flash tools definitely don't reflect the years of "effort" that have gone into them.

Seriously, you have to be a complete fool to CHOOSE to build an IDE on top of the bug-ridden warthog that is eclipse, do a bad job of implementing it, and then on top of that charge for it.

Given the choice, I would pick Silverlight over Flash without hesitation -- because as a developer I want the tools that will let me do my job most efficiently without forcing me to do it THEIR way, and the Silverlight toolchain does precisely that. Expression Blend + Visual Studio isn't perfect, but it blows the doors off of eclipse and Flash.

ashish_0x902• 16 years ago

Agree with your points. They should probably concentrate on their second chance with android, which they can use to show their product potential(if they can only can make a great product experience for end user, not the memory hogging exp. we are used to on the desktops)

They should also try to win over application developers community which apple have mostly ignored/dictated upon so far.

WiseWeasel3• 16 years ago

I wish they would concentrate on their second chance with desktop users of Flash as well... We're suffering from Flash's crappy behavior too!

isleyaardvark2• 16 years ago

...not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion, the one mechanism that has never been shown to work in the past.

But it has worked in the past. Popular opinion has already spoken, in the form of iPhone sales. Lack of Flash did not prevent the iPhone from being a success for the past 3 years, nor has it been desired enough to motivate other phone manufacturers to put Flash on their phones. Or motivated Adobe to make a good version of mobile Flash, for that matter. Adobe just wants Flash on the iPhone because there's a big market of developers they can sell their tools to.

alec2• 16 years ago

" nor has it been desired enough to motivate other phone manufacturers to put Flash on their phones"

... except for all the ones using Android. RIM's supposedly also working on Flash for the Blackberry.

astine• 16 years ago

" Application development for mobile devices is a developing market. There's room for something new. A new programming language, a new framework, new things I can't even imagine involving location, clouds, whatever."

Except if they can't get it on the iPhone they may as well be Loki Games. They need to be on the dominant player to gain traction, and it doesn't look like the dominant player is willing to let them gain any traction.

raganwald5• 16 years ago

What I mean is this: If they are over on Android and Blackberry and WebOs helping developers make the same kinds of applications that developers are making on iPhone, they're going to lose unless Android or Blackberry or WebOS find a way to win independently of Flash.

But if there is some new kind of application that I can't imagine that they facilitate, some new category that is so compelling for end users that they buy whatever phone runs the new application, then another phone can supplant iPhone the way PCs supplanted Apple IIs.

If Adobe's product is the dominant way to write the new kind of app, Adobe will ride this new market the way Flash rode the explosion of the web.

But fundamentally, it has to be something new that makes all of the existing apps seem like yesterday's news.

mustpax• 16 years ago

"... it would be incredibly cool if they went out and bought some tiny startup or lab with a really revolutionary product and pimped it out as the successor to Flash for mobile devices."

Instead, Adobe went and bought Omniture for $1.8B. The acquisition has "completing the loop" written all over it. These are the actions of an incumbent who is more concerned with milking their position than maintaining it. We should be glad Apple lighting a fire under Adobe's feet; somebody needs to remind them to compete.

lwhi• 16 years ago

The crux argument is: Apple need to stop being _too_ controlling.

baconsaltRocks• 16 years ago

Wasnt the campaign supposed to mean Adobe loves apple but not Apple® ?

Alex63• 16 years ago

Can't help pointing out that shortly after Sean Connery's character derides Capone's men for "bringing a knife to a gunfight", they shoot him down in an alleyway into which he has chased them. Not that I expect anything similar in this particular case.

ergo98• 16 years ago

This latest ad campaign was poorly conceived. Adobe's prior response -- which was essentially "Ah well...fuck you Jobs. We'll be over there on Android and Blackberry and WebOS" was brilliant. It left it on the perfect note.

Now they've again gone back to pandering for sympathy. It's lame.

Nonetheless, this article is stupid. The author is hopping on the dogpile and saying all of the classic "talking points", hoping to pander to the audience with the right amount of fluffing.

acg• 16 years ago

With all this talk of flash you would be lead to believe that Adobe are the worst company in the world. I just isn't, they have some really good products that nobody in the industry has managed to copy yet. Let's face it, the reason for Apple's attitude is Adobe is a serious player with the resources that could change the nature of Apple's mobile computing platform and reduce mac sales (developers really have to buy a Mac to write apps).

I'm not for flash, but some of the authoring tools available from Adobe are difficult to copy. I'm thinking how would I do some of that key frame animation that's been in flash for years in html5? Tweening?

Is this another case where the competition is fended off for just enough time to build the software in-house or buy it in?

rmason• 16 years ago

This guy from the headline forward doesn't get it. Adobe may not have had a hand in starting the DOJ or FTC investigations of Apple's new developer contract but they are determined to get in front of the parade to see them prosecuted.

This campaign is all about shaping public opinion and if they succeed Apple will pull down their artifical wall.

IMHO that's what this whole campaign is all about. Back fifteen years ago when Microsoft was playing a variation of this game by not giving equal access for outsiders to all their api you guys sided against Microsoft.

Now that it's Apple doing it why are you using Microsoft's old argument that the complainer needs to just go back and innovate? In case you haven't noticed Adobe is doing plenty of amazing things.

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

sigh

Outside of HN and the tech community, the general public doesn't give a SHIT about this kind of argument. Adobe can try to shape public opinion all day long, and it won't matter in the end. The only way they can survive is creating innovative products. Lately, they seem completely incapable of doing that.

nostromo• 16 years ago

> you guys sided against Microsoft.

The key difference is the monopoly issue. People have a choice today about what operating system they want on their computer and smart phone, and developers have a choice about which platform they want to develop on. This wasn't the case back in the bad old days.

Adobe, You Brought An Advertisement To A Gun Fight

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