Apple’s refusal for adding Flash to iPad/iPhone has nothing to do with battery usage.

Off course it was a brilliant marketing trick, everyone started writing about it and discussing the issue.

It even made a Dutch Newspaper define Adobe Flash as one of the losers in 2011. Which is one reason that triggered me to publish this post now, it has been a draft for nearly a year. Alas, the fate of many of my posts, no time to work out and state properly my (initial) thoughts.

The other reason is this remark Apple is the only dominant player in this game who has enough confidence in their own software, platforms and ecosystem, to truly have no interest in “owning” the web one way or another by Faruk Ateş.

Sorry, did I miss anything, aren’t patents supposed to let you own something and forbid others to use that. Aren’t patents a kind of owning a technology, a kind of a monopoly? Isn’t there a (many many many) lawsuit between Apple and Samsung. Wasn’t there an intial `bug` in iOS that made ipads not play HTML5 video if Apple`s own shared patented technology (H.264/MP4) wasn’t named first?.
Nice `bugs` to kickstart your own technology. Why did Apple oppose to a patent-free video format?

And sure flash can cause a huge CPU load, which strains the battery a lot. That’s true, but HTML5 / CSS3 animations do the same. There isn’t a real gain yet in playing a video in Flash or in HTML5, AFAIK.

The real reason for Apple refusal is the battle for video and audio codecs and formats on the internet. They were losing grip (what the hell is Quicktime) on how video and audio content was served to the web. Lately there were two ways, Flash, and since Olympic Games also Silverlight, Apple’s own plugin product Quicktime was dead meat, (despite pushing it with security updates for their browser and vice versa)

Flash is from Adobe and Silverlight is from Microsoft. Apple’s refusal to allow Flash did also mean there will be no Silverlight. So the Dutch Public Broadcast moved form Flash to Silverlight and now they moved to HTML5 for Ipad/Iphone only. Why other systems like Opera on Linux 64 are ruled out from HTML5 video seems weird, there has never been a good Linux 64 flash plugin, there is no support for Opera in Silverlight/Monolight.

The Dutch Public Broadcast moved to the Silverlight standard, not because it was technically superior or it was better supported, (Linux support has always been behind Windows support, Opera has never had support, Chrome had support only after a (few) years of existence). What’s a better way of consolidating the dominant position of the Windows market share on the PC OS market, then show the name Windows on every page of the Dutch Public Broadcast. They claimed they choose it because it offered better tracking of user statisitics. (?!). When the iPad was launched they immediately offered HTML5 video for Ipad only. If you don’t have an iPad you have to use Silverlight, even if it isn’t supported on your platform or browser of choice.

So what did Apple do, they were losing a battle, they flee/jumped forward to the new technology HTML5 but embracing only support for their own (shared) patented technoloy mp4/h.264. Everbody praised Apple…

Apple is the only dominant player in this game who has enough confidence in their own software, platforms and ecosystem, to truly have no interest in “owning” the web one way or another.
My ass!

Jobs was a visionary and smart business man. Like most bankers.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2012 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Webtechnology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.