Steve Jobs’ Email Debate With Gawker Blogger

http://erictric.com/2010/05/15/steve-jobs-email-debate-with-gawker-blogger/

by rooshdi • 16 years ago

138 178 16 years ago

evo_9• 16 years ago

Man, gotta give credit to Jobs on those replies. He's one of the few CEO's out there that actually answers things honestly versus just spewing some marketing lines or other prepared statements. Even if I don't entirely agree with him I have to respect his standpoint, it is his company.

sabat2• 16 years ago

Agreed. You know, if Jobs would lighten up just a tad, I'd respect him a lot more. He's done great things, but his perception of how far he should impose his views on the world has become distorted.

IdeaHamster11• 16 years ago

Gah! See my above rant, but seriously, how is he imposing his views on you when you are the one with the choice of how to spend your money! This is the sort of complaint I would expect to hear about how the government is spending tax dollars, which you don't get a choice about paying or not.

biafra• 16 years ago

I have seen this Story here [dead] at least 7 times (with a link from gawker.com). Were they all duplicates? If so, how do find the comments page to the first submission?

bbatsell4• 16 years ago

Unless something has changed in the intervening year (and I sincerely doubt it), gawker.com is on the HN banlist.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=499044

IdeaHamster11• 16 years ago

Key line: Gosh, why are you so bitter over a technical issue such as this? Its not about freedom, its about Apple trying to do the right thing for its users. Users, developers and publishers can do whatever they like - they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to

I have this theory. You see, Apple (mostly) tends to not engage in the all-too-common tricks to try and con you out of your money. Store staff is typically honest and straight-forward, very little pushing and no hidden fees. Apple Care is probably a better value than most extended warrantees, and at least you know you're going to get Apple's level of customer service. Yes, there are lock-ins, but they've always been a trade-off in order to provide a better experience for their customers (i.e. DRM on iTunes sucks, but it was the only way to get the majors to play ball).

In general, Apple believes that you should give them money only if you believe their products are worth it. I think it's just that we've gotten so used to capitalism being such a hostile activity between producer and consumer that we forget that there was a time when you would've wanted to pay for something. So, it's no wonder that people want to think that Apple is somehow conning them into giving up their freedom or being locked-down unnecessarily.

Really...trust me...you don't have to buy an Apple product. No, seriously, you don't! So why don't you take your "freedom" and "open platform" rant and turn it into a why isn't anyone even close to competing on Apple's level missive.

Osmose• 16 years ago

It makes me angry that a company that appears to go against my ideals is so popular and successful, because I believe my ideals are better. It's not in any way a good argument, but I might as well admit it rather than claiming otherwise.

jballanc7• 16 years ago

So I presume you have started a company based around your ideals? I think people don't realize that there is no magic fairy dust at 1 Infinite Loop. Apple's success is really quite easy to reproduce. It only takes one thing: guts!

maxharris• 16 years ago

The true in theory is the successful in practice. Have you considered that your ideals could be wrong?

blehn2• 16 years ago

I think that line clarifies what people in the tech industry seem to be missing in this whole controversy: It's not about developers.

It's about users, and creating a great experience for them. Developers getting upset about flash not running on the device, apps getting rejected, etc--that's just an unintentional side-effect of putting the user first.

elblanco7• 16 years ago

Users do have to use something. Developers make those things.

MichaelGG2• 16 years ago

Yep. It may have been about developers in the past, but it doesn't look that way going forward. The app store only needs so many apps, and there are tons of devs to fill in, no matter which technology isn't allowed.

jimbokun3• 16 years ago

Developers also have choices, though, and if they feel Apple isn't treating them right they should develop for another platform. As a group, developers have a lot to say about the success of a platforms with consumers.

gizmomagico• 16 years ago

Right, and users would notice and care if some application "duplicated functionality".

3.3.1 is not the only problem - there have been lots of bullshit rejections too.

calibraxis• 16 years ago

But Apple seems to limit the role of users. I'm a user -- a relatively skilled one, since I not only consume software, but create it too.

As I understand, there are two Apple bureaucracies in the way: one which collects about a $100/year fee to let you go beneath a superficial level, and another where Apple bureaucrats examine your software before it can be conveniently shared. (Do I misunderstand?) This apparently even holds true with free software.

These bureaucracies make it difficult for interested users to move along the skill spectrum. They seem to enforce a strict separation between developers and users.

timcederman2• 16 years ago

Minor nit - I found the upsell when buying an iPhone at the Boston Apple store crass to say the least. My wife got told she HAD to buy Apple Care to have a warranty, HAD to get Mobile Me "to use the phone properly" and HAD to get an SMS plan if she wanted to send texts.

I called to complain and got a fairly hopeless uninterested manager.

Groxx• 16 years ago

Complain further up the chain. Nobody should be doing that, it's preying on the uninformed.

Herring2• 16 years ago

> they don't have to buy or develop or publish on iPads if they don't want to

That's a non-argument. Like saying if you don't like America why don't you leave. It's designed to shut down criticism. He's saying you should accept (or reject) the entire package without looking at details.

> and turn it into a why isn't anyone even close to competing on Apple's level missive.

It's certainly not because open platforms are unsuccessful, if that's what you're implying. You can find any number of examples of this.

IdeaHamster11• 16 years ago

> That's a non-argument. Like saying if you don't like America why don't you leave.

Bzzzt! But thanks for playing... Unfortunately there's this concept known as citizenship. You're sorta born into it (usually). Ask any immigrant you meet, and I'm pretty sure they'll tell you that getting over all the legal requirements associated with moving countries is non-trivial (and that's even considering that the US, for all the criticism it receives, has one of the more open immigration policies in the world).

You know what it takes to be free from the tyranny of the iPad? Don't buy one! So why is that a non-argument? Because you're entitled to an iPad under terms and conditions you feel are reasonable? Freedom comes with citizenship because you don't have a choice there...

> It's certainly not because open platforms are unsuccessful

Did I say that? Here, let me try this again: Apple makes a product and sells it for a price. You have a job (presumably) and make money to spend on products. You can buy Apple's product, or not. They're not trying to trick you by claiming this product is something its not. You, having not entered into a contract commissioning the product they are selling have precisely zero right to demand the product be anything other than what it is.

If you don't like the product, buy something else. If there's nothing else comparable to buy your choices are: 1. make something better yourself 2. ask somebody else to make something better for you to buy

Tichy• 16 years ago

What does that have to do with anything? Also not sure if it is true or not. "Conning" says too much, but Apple does promise a lot of things that are not really true. Their computers are not that easy to use and not free of problems.

A lot of people have been led to believe that their computing problems will all go away if they switch to Apple, which simply isn't true.

davidw• 16 years ago

> So, it's no wonder that people want to think that Apple is somehow conning them into giving up their freedom or being locked-down unnecessarily.

As long as Apple products either 1) play with open standards or 2) remain a niche, that's fine, they can lock in and lock down all their loving fans as much as they want. Not my game, but yeah, I buy other stuff and don't worry about it.

The worries start when they get big enough in something to have "positive network externalities" - network effects - that start influencing my life, whether I like it or not. For instance, if their phones managed to really take over the market, it would make it impossible not to deal with their crap for me, and I would at that point face the choice of either having to deal with "Steve's world" or simply not doing mobile phone stuff. I think I'd choose the latter, but it's not a choice I want to be forced into.

josefresco2• 16 years ago

70,000 Android activations/day. Each and every day. It's coming and Apple won't be able to stop it this time either.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

If the iPad is succesful, then it will affect me whether I buy it or not. Just like Micrsoft's success has filled my inbox with spam from botnets and limited my tech choices in a myriad of ways. Just like Facebook's success means there's no room for an alternative until they really shaft people.

It's called network effects and it's one of the basic elements of information technology. That's why we care about what the idiots are buying and what the power-crazed shysters are selling them.

Ironically, the answer to your question is that many of the other large companies (e.g. Microsoft, Telcos) have already locked people in and don't even need to care about competing at Apple's level in order to rake in the cash, they just have to occasionally intervene to prevent competition from entering their market. Does that sound familiar in the context on Apple?

mdolon• 16 years ago

A big part of it is psychological - when I was at the Apple store last night, people were waiting in line to play with any and all of the Apple products. Whenever someone would move away from something, another person would jump on it without knowing or caring what it was. If a consumer sees everyone around them buying a product, chances are they're going to want that item too. It's like peer pressure for the consumer market, you buy things to be cool (of course this applies to everything, not just Apple).

jarek15• 16 years ago

Man, I hate not having the freedom from porn. Thanks, Apple!

IdeaHamster11• 16 years ago

Mobile Safari. That is all...

jarek15• 16 years ago

Exactly.

itistoday6• 16 years ago

Anyone else a little surprised that Jobs even got into this debate in the first place? Like, shouldn't he have had this already with some employee on the inside?

It seems to suggest that at Apple he has no opportunity to have such debates. Everyone is too scared, it's almost like he's surrounded by yes-men and is therefore astonished at the negative response he's getting. "Why can't people just understand me?" type of thing.

Here's a thought. If no one at Apple is actually standing up to Jobs, and since he seems open to outside input via email, perhaps it's a good idea to let him know how you feel? Maybe he actually doesn't get how much he's turned Apple into the 1984 Big Brother that Apple was supposed to vanquish?

bbatsell4• 16 years ago

> Like, shouldn't he have had this already with some employee on the inside?

How is this e-mail chain in any way evidence that Apple has not had internal debate or that no one has the guts to disagree with Steve Jobs?

itistoday6• 16 years ago

I'm not claiming it's definitive evidence, I'm just saying it seems to suggest it.

Apple has made a lot of really ethically questionable moves, and is being quite hypocritical in many cases. This is obvious to me, and others. So when someone on the outside brought this up, Steve Jobs responded in a way that almost seems like it's the first time he's having this debate. That's just my take on it.

Or do you really think that many at Apple had this same or similar kind of debate with Jobs, and then he's willing to publicly have it again with Tate? His arguments are just too weak and unpolished for it, and it's surprising he's responding to Tate at all if he's already deliberated it internally and settled on his position.

starkfist3• 16 years ago

No, you are really reaching. He replies to a lot of user email, seemingly at random. Years ago a friend of mine in a completely unrelated industry used to exchange email with him about odd things that happened in the Santa Cruz mountains.

itistoday6• 16 years ago

I never said it was surprising that he replies to emails.

krav4• 16 years ago

Best part is Job's last comment: By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Creating something of value is hard. It takes dedication, iteration, consistent work, focus, and sacrifice. And to do it again and again? Rare.

Apple - regardless of motivation - has done that under Jobs. The sales show the result. I'd respect him, a doer, above a talker like Gawker any day.

jarek15• 16 years ago

Without expressing an opinion about the value of Apple products, I would be careful about implying a causation between a product's sales and its value or "greatness".

krav4• 16 years ago

Fair enough - I was going for an "unbiased" metric. Could have been market cap, stock price, etc.

In a nutshell, my respect goes to the builders and hackers of the world, not the talkers.

ajscherer• 16 years ago

That's the worst part! It's a tired ad hominem and completely irrelevant to the discussion they were having. Jobs' argument for Apple's decisions should be convincing regardless of the accomplishments of the person he is (voluntarily) arguing with.

pak• 16 years ago

The point of that, really, was that Jobs shouldn't need to convince anybody about Apple's decisions, the products of the company speak for themselves. It's not as much an ad hominem as a "if you don't like my decisions Ryan, go make your own product and your own company." That seems fair to me.

Jobs isn't exactly bound by divine law to uphold every blogger's rosy picture of the future of mobile computing. If he's bound by anything as CEO of Apple, it's to make the future of the company a great and profitable one, and you cannot argue that he is not doing that.

clawrencewenham2• 16 years ago

Steve doesn't have to be convincing else he want to lose sales, and he doesn't care as much about sales as he cares about the product.

His is a common retaliation to Gawker's kind of criticism: the criticism that your creations ought to satisfy the consumer. This has always been bullshit. You should create what you think is right and then discover who the consumer is. The alternative is design by committee writ large and absurd, like Windows. You get something that even the creator hates.

Steve says the effect of "if you don't like it, buy something else" (almost in as many words, in fact). I hate that this sentiment isn't respected. So many people think they have a stake in something because they put it on their credit card.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

Sounds like he was trying to simply draw a line under the conversation - it was clearly starting to drift a bit too far.

wushupork• 16 years ago

I totally agree with you. That seemed to shut up the Gawker blogger. You can't please everybody and it isn't worth trying. And if you try to, you end up with a crappy product nobody wants and it's so far from your vision of what it should be. It takes guts to do what Jobs does. He's not doing this to be Mr Popular.

Despite what you may think of Jobs, he's pulled his company from horrible performance and has created value over and over. Anybody can talk smack and criticize. It takes will, dedication and passion do create.

elblanco7• 16 years ago

> By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?

Yes, let's hi-light and praise what's probably one of the most absolute jerkiest part of the exchange.

You don't have to make something popular to do something great. And no matter how great Jobs thinks he is, he didn't personally create most of the things Apple puts out -- the team of dedicated employees at Apple did. Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same.

neonfunk2• 16 years ago

"no matter how great Jobs thinks he is"... "Jobs is deriding and belittling their work just the same"...

I didn't read that Jobs thinks he's great or that his employees are stupid.

ZeroGravitas2• 16 years ago

I thought Steve Jobs main role at Apple was to "criticize others' work and belittle their motivations"? Didn't some of the early Apple employee's give him a rubber stamp with "this is shit" carved into it so he wouldn't have to waste time writing his feedback on their work?

tmsh2• 16 years ago

You can disagree with us, but our motives are pure.

I think that's the main problem. It's not enough to simply have pure motives. Nobody actually understands the complete extent or realization of their motives, and whether or not they're truly 'pure'. Hence, the importance of listening.

You can 'envision' all you want, but if you don't have good feedback loops, you're going to run into serious problems.

flyosity2• 16 years ago

The motives may be complex but I'm guessing it comes down to Apple not wanting garbage clunking up their beautiful and "magical" device. Random runtime environments that Apple can't control? Hell no. Cross-platform apps that use the lowest common denominator of features and are slow? Nope, sorry. Apps that sit outside the walled garden that might be nefarious? Yeah, right.

Jobs wants elegant and beautiful apps on his "revolutionary" device. If it's not one or both of those things, then he's probably not happy with it and doesn't want users to see it.

tmsh2• 16 years ago

I didn't notice it until reading your response, but I suppose there's a pun on 'pure'.

Pure environment, pure performance ('not wanting garbage clunking up their beautiful and "magical" device' as you mention), and also pure as in honest.

But purity is not really a word you want to overload.... Fundamentally incoherent to conflate two ideas about purity. And really deeply problematic. Anyhoo, thx for your thoughts.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

I'm not happy with some of the things Apple has done in the iPhone realm but reading that email thread, I'd have to say Steve had a stronger and more mature case.

quizbiz• 16 years ago

I don't understand how sjobs manages this. I can't imagine how many emails he gets now that people are expecting responses. He must enjoy interacting directly with his consumers a great deal.

xenophanes5• 16 years ago

> Yep, freedom from programs that steal your private data. Freedom from programs that trash your battery. Freedom from porn. Yep, freedom. The times they are a changin’, and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

What he's advocating for the app store may be a good thing, but it's certainly insane to call it freedom. Freedom is when you can do whatever you want. When you restrict stuff, for better or worse, that's less freedom. Taking away all meaning from the word "freedom" is a really bad idea.

There is simply no such thing as freedom from the option to watch porn if one wants to watch it. That's like freedom from truancy, or freedom from marijuana, or freedom from leaving your jail cell, enforced by the police. Some will argue those are good things, but none should argue those are freedoms.

ellyagg• 16 years ago

Actually, I think it's fairly well known that there's a tension between two real concepts of 'freedom from' and 'freedom to'.

xenophanes5• 16 years ago

Yes, it's well known that there is an ongoing attack on the liberal idea of freedom which seeks even to destroy basic terminology.

They're the same kind of people who made the word "liberal" mean "socialist" or "interventionist" which is something of the opposite of its original and true meaning.

But the fact is freedom has a simple and plain meaning, and it's a meaning we need to have a word for. If you want to say that police stopping you from using marijuana is good, whatever, just make up some other word for that because that's the opposite of freedom.

Or if you think people have the right to "freedom from want" at the expense of others, it's nothing but a nasty and misleading rhetorical trick to call that freedom. It may or may not be good, but you're taking away people's freedom of choice when you force them to provide for the poor. Force is not freedom, it's force, end of story.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

But one has to torture the English language a bit in the "freedom from" case.

jfager3• 16 years ago

There is simply no such thing as freedom from the option to watch porn if one wants to watch it.

You're missing his point. There's nothing on the iPad that prevents you from watching porn if you want to - Safari on iPad goes to the same porn sites as any browser anywhere else. What he's referring to is protecting your machine from porn adware, and providing effective parental controls.

xenophanes5• 16 years ago

Look, I generally agree with Steve. I have no serious problem with how he runs the app store. I think he's providing something that his customers want.

But are you telling me parental controls -- i.e. software to restrict the freedom of children -- should in any way be called freedom? For better or worse, restricting people is not freedom. What I'm saying is it's perverse to use words to mean their opposites.

And BTW, as you surely know, porn apps are restricted in the app store. He thinks that is a way of protecting users from porn. It may well be the right decision, but protecting people from themselves is not increasing freedom.

jarek15• 16 years ago

Porn malware is a solved problem, both on Mac OS X and on Windows, the latter if you use a reasonable browser. Neither of these feature a closed, App Store-like model.

Steve knows this, and -- considering he has porn in his App Store, behind the age limit -- he knows that his lines about porn on Android (also behind the age limit) are pure FUD. It's kind of embarrassing.

tailrecursion• 16 years ago

Allowing a tyrant to exert his will may result in less freedom for others. Judging by the technical way you couched your argument, I think you're aware of the subtle way freedom works. It wasn't difficult for me to get what Steve was talking about. Suppose you are a developer. You are being given the option -- one might say the freedom -- to sign a contract that limits your freedom and that of others who sign it, in just such a way as to confer specific advantages on yourself and others, such as a porn-free environment. To claim that to be given that option necessarily limits one's freedom, would certainly be insane.

(Edit: added comma, added clarifications)

Tycho• 16 years ago

I think he was knowingly diluting the meaning of the word 'freedom' in response to how the blogger used it. Che Guevara didn't die so we could run Linux on proprietary handheld devices.

jcooney• 16 years ago

Reminds me of a line from a song "Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose'".

statictype3• 16 years ago

How does the iPad prevent you from watching porn?

pohl7• 16 years ago

He was referring to porn apps in the store.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

Which makes his "freedom from porn" schtick a bit crazy. Freedom - just as long as you don't ever use Safari.

He implies that once you become a parent, porn is a taboo. It isn't in my neck of the woods, and I'd much rather my daughter stumbled across some people banging on the TV in future than most of the bullshit violence that passes for "entertainment" nowadays. But, hey, I'm European.

statictype3• 16 years ago

Interesting. I guess in a similar vein, my Android phone affords me freedom from fart apps. And my Windows box gives me freedom from a stable os.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

Jobs claims that "magazine apps will be far better in the end because they're written native." Does he think magazines will natively code an app for every single issue of their magazine to make all the content features, animations, interactive elements, and fancy indexes work?

Before you say "don't be crazy, the magazines will be creating specially formatted documents that their readers will load", why can't Adobe make a "Flash Player" app that can load "specially formatted documents" (i.e SWF files) too? Is it merely because SWFs often contain ActionScript fun rather than Jobs' preferred JavaScript fun?

pohl7• 16 years ago

Where's the line between a document and an app, after all?

It's usually the same as the line between code and data. Yes, this line has been crossed before, but the practice is not without downsides one might want to avoid, and so a Turing Complete format like Postscript was supplanted by a static representation of the same drawing model in the form of PDF documents. Word macro viruses may not have done the same to the Doc format, but I still think it should be considered an antipattern.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

To provide another example that does work on the iPad, though, SVG files can contain code, such as this analog clock: http://anomaly.org/wade/projects/svgClocks/simple-analog.svg

flyosity2• 16 years ago

They can easily write an application that uses in-app purchases to allow the user to purchase (each week, or month) the next issue. What can the issue be? Well, that's simple, it can be HTML (5 if you want, or anything else) and then it can be displayed in a UIWebView within the application.

petercooper5• 16 years ago

And what is the issue? Is it something that is being interpreted? If so, it had better be in JavaScript otherwise it would contravene 3.3.1. Anyway, if you look at most of the magazine apps that do this so far, they are far more elaborate than HTML and JavaScript creations.. Given there is scripting involved somewhere down the line, they must be using JavaScript or will ultimately violate 3.3.1.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

After reading this article, I want to start a company that makes computing products to free users from the oppression of Jobs' proprietary software. The advertisement will be the face Steve Jobs reading this email on a huge monolith-like television screen. A woman will run up to it, and throw a hammer at Jobs' face, smashing the monolith into millions of pieces. This represents the freeing of the users and developers from the tyranny of Jobs.

For some reason, though, I think I've seen this before... somewhere...

jballanc7• 16 years ago

After reading this article, I want to start a company

Do you really want to? or do you just want to pontificate on the internet using this as a coy rhetorical device? Because, you know, if you really wanted to...well, you might just be successful!

jrockway2• 16 years ago

If you don't like pontification on the Internet with coy rhetorical devices, I'm somewhat confused as to why you read the comment sections of social news sites. And reply.

statictype3• 16 years ago

I have to say, nice response from the CEO. His straight no-bullshit response is commendable and will, for many people, distract from the ridiculous definition of freedom he uses.

weilawei• 16 years ago

Steve Jobs' response irks me because he equates (by association) "freedom from porn" with "freedom from programs that steal your private data" and "Freedom programs that trash your battery," "Yep, freedom," itself. "[...] their world is slipping away. It is."

Freedom from porn? Steve pulls no punches--what does porn mean to us? Is it something evil, something that only subjugated people will perform in? Does it provide an legitimate outlet for a different sort of sexual fetish? Who uses whom? I don't know the answers, but I'm sure there are a multitude, many of them with a nugget of truth.

I don't feel as if we need to be protected from ourselves. This is a statement--assuming that it was, in fact, reported in good faith--written by a man in a position of power which asserts a sort of moral judgement about our culture.

Please, don't misunderstand: Mr. Jobs is entirely correct in his statement that, "Microsoft had (has) every right to enforce whatever rules for their platform they want. If people don’t like it, they can write for another platform, which some did. Or they can buy another platform, which some did." Indeed, Apple appears (from my non-lawyerly perspective) to be exercising the same supposed right without serious challenge in a court of law.

I, myself, write on a MacBook. I enjoy using and working with the technology that Apple offers--but I'm not married to Jobs' vision. I wonder what the future holds, and Jobs' words don't paint a great picture for me.

What does the world he and Apple envision for us look like?

seshagiric• 16 years ago

Steve Woz, Steve Jobs, Bill gates and even Richard Stallman - all have commented on that post :)

cageface• 16 years ago

It's unfortunate that this conversation wasn't initiated by someone more mature and articulate than Ryan Tate. There is a strong case to be made against Apple's current approach but Ryan didn't make it.

wsgeek• 16 years ago

Gentlemen,

Steve is not being overly controlling... You are all looking at his "blocking" of Flash as a closed-minded policy. Consider this: Do Active-X controls run on the iPhone (or Android)? No -- they never have, and this is for technical AND business reasons. It would be fairly easy to support them -- just have WINE as part of OS X. The reason Apple doesn't do this is because they would be letting the fox into the henhouse and adding unnecessary bloat to a mobile device. Everyone seems to get this, which is why you don't hear complaints from all of the Java and Silverlight people about not being able to code for iPhones.

To another point: Ask yourselves -- What is Adobe's business model? They make NO money on the Flash plugin. It's free. They make their money on tools. If I'm the Adobe CEO, I would strive to have every app in the world written in Flash. Now who is close-minded? And by the way, Adobe could solve this VERY easily by making their tools output in HTML5, etc. Why don't they want to do this? Because they feel that HTML5 might be slow to adopt features that they already have. Oh wait -- now the shoe is on the other foot! Adobe realizes that the innovation of their platform would be stifled by any lack of features in HTML5. So why don't they have their tools output Objective-C code which could then be compiled by Apple's tools? My understanding of section 3.3.1 is that this is allowed.

Developer tools are the gateway to a platform. Microsoft knows this -- which is why they have some of the most mature tools around. When Microsoft adds a feature to their operating system, why do you as developers feel comfortable waiting for Flash, Java, etc to create an interface to that new feature? If I were a software company, I would embrace a platform and strive to be the best on it -- use every new feature to its fullest extent. Guys, this is what you get paid to do -- innovate, using whatever tools are necessary! It's about the end user experience. This is what makes an app sell.

So what Steve is gambling on, and it's a bold yet well-considered move, is that the iPhone/iPad/iPod platform (hardware + OS) will always be slightly ahead of competitors. And the developers who agree will retrain themselves to take advantage of the platform. Development tool vendors will do the same. If Apple were to release a killer hardware feature on the iPhone (which is their business model to do so!), how long would it take for Flash to incorporate it into not only their player but also their development tools? Would they wait until Android implemented it too before doing the release? This harms Apple, it harms developers, and it harms consumers.

Flash has a cross-platform, least-common-denominator approach to computing. This is a thing of the past!

You might be saying to yourselves that Microsoft never blocked anything -- Flash, Java, RealPlayer, etc. Well, they have a different business model. They want people to consider Windows as the defacto OS platform, and they want to support an ecosystem of ISVs that fill in all the gaps. It's a very well-conceived plan, and it only works because they have a near monopoly on the desktop. If they did not, then their business model would not work. Imagine if you will a world where Linux itself was not free AND they charged for the development tools AND those were the only tools you can use to develop for the platform (as is DevStudio). As you can see, Linux's lack of market share would make this an untenable business model.

Why do you think they charge money for their development tools? Eclipse, XCode, and dozens of others are free of charge (yes, I know there is a free version of DevStudio but it is missing some key features). They charge money because they CAN. Adobe charges money because they CAN. If Apple were to charge money for XCode, it would kill the platform. Think about this anytime you are bashing Apple for the high perceived cost of their computers relative to humdrum PCs -- you're getting software that was developed by companies that got the tools for free, and this means you will get better software.

Flash developers, you are right to be up in arms over the omission of Flash as part of the iPhone OS. But you're directing your anger at the wrong party. First, I understand that you are loathe to have to learn a new toolset (which you feel is inferior to Flash) to get your apps out there. Years of experience that you have will help to bridge that gap! You are good developers and you will find a way. You should instead be asking yourselves, why are there no 3rd-party Flash development tools that compare to Adobe's?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Third-party_tools

Why is the .SWF format not entirely open?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.swf#Licensing

Adobe has great tools that create compelling apps -- there's no denying that.

Microsoft has great tools that create compelling apps -- there's no deny that.

And Apple has great tools too. Closed systems are a thing of the past (remember when Microsoft had "hidden" APIs that their apps used?). By being forced to expose the hidden APIs, it removed the need for cross-platform emulation/library layers. Yes, it's more work for you, but c'mon, you're good developers, the best at what you do. You will find a way.

WiseWeasel3• 16 years ago

Beyond the Adobe/Flash issue, what's the supporting moral argument for preventing an iPhone user from installing a native Google Voice app, to pick an example? This is a device that the user owns, and the user desires the capabilities of this particular app, and yet they are denied by Apple, after having already invested significantly into the platform. This is obviously an insult to the customer, and the only motivation Apple has is business greed, not some altruistic sacrifice to the user experience gods. When the vendor is actively impeding the customer from attaining what they want for nebulous reasons, we have a PR problem here that competitors can capitalize on. The best user experience in the world won't save you when a competitor figures out how to empower your customers more greatly, because obviously their user experience was sufficiently well-designed to allow their users to accomplish the task that they couldn't on your platform.

lawn• 16 years ago

"By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

I immediately thought about the movie Thank you for smoking where this guy said that the best way to win a discussion was to prove the opponent wrong. You didn't have to be right, as long as he was wrong.

FabriceTalbot• 16 years ago

This was simply an EPIC email exchange! The blogger made some really good points there. And Steve kept his cool remarcably well, until the end. It kind of makes you wish he hadn't pulled that "what have you done that's so great" card.

Steve Jobs’ Email Debate With Gawker Blogger

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