Apple like 19th Century railroad baron [says canal owner]
Adobe’s made the questionable decision to use a historical metaphor to described recent Apple moves to block Flash from the iPhone OS platform. Thereupon, it’s pretty easy to aptly extend that metaphor to include Adobe, which is still futilely pushing its last century multimedia technology.
MarketWatch is reporting comments by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch in which he likens Apple’s decision to block Flash to the behavior of 19th Century railroad barons, who were known for doing whatever it took to win.
“Apple’s playing this strategy where they want to create a walled garden,” said Lynch at a tech conference in San Francisco, likening the company’s moves to the deployment of railways with varying gauges in the 1800s, which precluded compatibility with the trains of rivals.
“If you look at what’s going on right now, it’s kind of like railroads in the 1800s,” he added.
Well, if Apple’s a railroad — a technology that rapidly spread technology, development and wealth around the world — then Adobe most assuredly is a canal, a great way to deliver stuff if you don’t mind slow (really slow) not to mention government subsidies and massive public works boondoggles. Canals, along with their backers in the government bureaucracy, fought a decades-long rearguard action against railroads that ultimately saw them lose out to a superior technology.
Fundamentally uncompetitive
Whereas Adobe’s CEO has said Apple (and even Microsoft’s) qualms about Flash’s numerous technical failings — security, performance, resource consumption — are merely a smokescreen, there’s no question that Flash is a very last century way of delivering multimedia. It’s an unnecessary and, frankly, unwanted middleman between we the users and content.
Thereupon, one assumes once Adobe’s attempt to tar Apple with the antitrust brush fails, they’ll be back in Washington seeking subsidies or even protection — at least that’s the way railroad vs. canal metaphor played out historically.
Perhaps we should love and embrace Flash out of a sense of nostalgia?
Thereupon, let’s erect a granite monument to Flash saying how grateful we are for its role fostering development of the Web (up to about 2005) and just skip straight to the good part (a Flash free future)…
What’s your take?
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