“Apple Inc. and longtime partner Adobe Systems Inc. are at a flash point over the iPhone,” Ben Charny reports for Dow Jones Newswires.
“Since its debut in late June, the iPhone’s exalted mobile Web browser has been off limits to nearly all videos delivered over the Internet. That’s because the browser isn’t compatible with an Adobe-made media player, known as ‘Flash Player,’ which is used to view Internet videos,” Charny reports.
Charny reports, “Adobe’s patience appears to be wearing thin. ‘No one aside from (Apple Chief Executive) Steve Jobs has any idea if or when it’s coming,’ Ryan Stewart, Adobe’s chief spokesman for its Internet-based applications, wrote on his blog last week. ‘Everyone I talk to doesn’t know anything.'”
“The iPhone’s history is already marked by Apple’s demands scaring off would-be Apple partners, including No. 2 U.S. cell phone operator Verizon Wireless, jointly owned by Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, and China Mobile, Asia’s biggest telecom. Now it appears the same tactics are straining Apple’s relationship with long-time partner Abode,” Charny reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Complete load from Charny. Just because Verizon et al. blew it and couldn’t make deal for the device that is transforming their industry, doesn’t mean that Apple “scared off would-be partners.” As for China Mobile: Apple CEO Steve Jobs told CNBC on January 15, 2008, that rumors of on-again, off-again negotiations with China Mobile are simply untrue; just a single China Mobile rep. has flown out to Cupertino only once. There are no ongoing negotiations, just a first meeting, Jobs explained. Jobs wants iPhone in China, but details will come later. This is nothing more than a case of piss poor “reporting” from Charny.
Charny continues, “The stand-off could resolve by the end of the month when Apple’s due to release iPhone software tools that may include a way to make the iPhone compatible with Flash Player. That’ll certainly cheer investors; any ensuing Adobe/iPhone tie up will erase a lingering concern and certainly lift Apple’s beleaguered shares. But failure to end the stalemate raises the volume on the issue, and puts even more strain on the two companies’ relationship.”
MacDailyNews Take: Beleaguered?! Apple’s shares are trading at $123.30, up 46% from their opening price of $84.65 one year ago today. Adobe’s shares, by the way, are trading at $35.16, down 14% from their opening price of $40.09 one year ago today. The only things beleaguered here are Charny’s logic and credibility.
Charny continues, “iPhone sales seem to be taking a slight hit as a result of the kerfuffle, though no formal study’s ever been made. The lack of Flash Player is though an oft-cited reason why someone wouldn’t buy it, according to a number of different Apple online user forums.”
MacDailyNews Take: More made up crap masquerading as “reporting.” Charny is a joke.
Charny continues, “The closest Apple has come to addressing the issue was shortly after the iPhone’s release, when Jobs, in a widely-circulated published interview, said Flash Player would ultimately make it to the iPhone. With both companies keeping mum since then, it’s been largely left to outsiders to suggest why the two aren’t yet seeing eye to eye… Around 2002, Adobe dropped support for Apple’s Macintosh computers, and then introduced several other software products that were only compatible with Microsoft software.”
Full article, Think Before You Click™, here.
Charny is absolutely horrible at his job. Adobe never dropped support for Apple’s Macintosh computers. Without Apple Macintosh computers there would be no Adobe today.
The only Mac products Adobe ever dropped support for were products that Apple did such a better job with that Adobe simply couldn’t compete. See Final Cut vs. Premiere (which is back on the Mac, by the way).
Back in January 2007, six months before iPhone’s release, The New York Times’ John Markoff interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs who said in reply to a Flash on iPhone question, “You don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using H.264 instead of the old codec.”
Apple has since prompted Adobe to support H.264 in Flash either directly or indirectly (see related articles below). Perhaps Jobs wants even more from Adobe before he grants them access to the hottest mobile device on the planet?
jeez, the posts on here are extra-retarded today.
Soon as you you see the (completely unnecessary and inflammable) word ‘exalted’ you know the writer has an agenda.
Adobe, Flash is coming to iPhone as soon as you make Flash anything less than a battery sucking resource hog
and make it work with Keynote’s export in SWF. Only a few of the transitions work from Keynote. You’re at version 9 and don’t have any excuses. Quit blaming the other fella, Adobe.
It’s a shame now that Flash originated from a great little Mac only drawing program called Futurewave Smartsketch. I still run it along with PhotoShop on my OS 9 machine. (I will never pay $600 for Photoshop again).
Hey Tom,
Get your comments somewhere else or STFU
Maybe if they gave us decent performance on the Mac and didn’t make it take up so much of the CPU, it would’ve already been on there. How the hell do they expect flash to work even sort of decently with its dismal performance on OS X? And they expect Apple to make their device look slow because they can’t get their act together and properly support the platform that created and sustained them despite their obvious disdain for it?
@little tiny nitch guy:
Your “nitch” may not be as little and tiny as you think. Even before this posting it was becoming clear to me that Flash has not got any kind of end-user majority behind, and from a content provider side, the only reason it does have support is because it gives the broadcast industry an excuse to get even more deeply entrenched into Windows – which is required if you want to serve up Flash on a large scale… Thanks a lot Adobe – Apple “partner” ole buddy ole pale.
Add, en ratio, the negative comments about Flash you see here and it makes you wander why Flash has the free reign that it currently seems to enjoy…? I’m with sticking to established and open standards and weaning ourselves of Adobe and MS proprietary content and markup technologies.
It annoys the hell out off me when macdailynews.com peeps put their 2 cents in each article. Just fscking report it and let the readers judge. Maybe instead of rambling they should just but a star system, 0 stars for a shit article and 5 stars for a bad ass article
To Chester Cheetah: You might be the only one. Did you ask yourself who runs this site? Go on. I dare you.
@Mr. Peabody, agreed.
Adobe has turned itself into an MS wannabe. Sad but pathetically true. They want Flash to be some kind of ActiveX-like poison.
To Annoyed (Chester): Let us know when your Mac news site is up and running. Thanks.
Flash is evil.
Please, keep it off my iPhone.
To Mr. Reeee: Actually, I’d like to be able to choose which plug-ins I can run.
Any comments as to why Apple dropped support for Flash in Quicktime? That’s disturbed quite a few developers on the Mac. Is there any connection to this and the lack of Flash on the iPhone?
“The lack of Flash Player is though an oft-cited reason why someone wouldn’t buy it, according to a number of different Apple online user forums.”
Okay, maybe I don’t hang around the same forums as this guy, but I have yet to see somebody say, “I’m not buying an iPhone until it supports Flash.”
3G? Yes. More memory? Yes. An SDK? Yes.
Flash? Nope.
“iPhone’s exalted mobile Web browser has been off limits to nearly all videos delivered over the Internet.”
Okay… I buy this.
“That’s because the browser isn’t compatible with an Adobe-made media player, known as ‘Flash Player,'”
I don’t buy this. Flash doesn’t control “nearly all the videos delivered over the Internet”, so Charny’s ipso facto conclusion, and basis for a story, falls apart.
There is no doubt that the iPhone has some growing room for displaying web based video, but I don’t consider Flash to be the most important. I cannot view web QT videos. How about working on that first.
H.264 and AAC audio rocks, end of story.
How about Adobe fixes the lingering bugs with CS3 and Leopard before they start worrying about other things.
I do not believe that Apple wants to establish Flash – a proprietary standard that they do not own or control – as a standard for mobile internet viewing. John Gruber of Daring Fireball may have said it best (below). But to be fair, like John, I’ve been wrong before:
“But why exactly would Apple do this? With fewer than eight months on the market, MobileSafari — sans Flash support — already has the largest market share of all mobile web browsers. Companies large and small are writing MobileSafari-optimized web sites and web apps, using HTML/JavaScript/CSS. Apple is on the cusp of releasing the Cocoa-based native SDK. The single most popular thing people use Flash for is to watch YouTube videos, which you can already watch a subset of using the native Mobile OS X YouTube app. In short, is the lack of Flash keeping people from buying iPhones and iPod Touches?”
http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/news_flash_no_flash
Better question: When is the Intel-based version of Shockwave coming from Adobe?
Why Adobe started making software for MACs is beyond me. Maybe they felt sorry for MACs. They had such a great start with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop on Microsoft Windows, then came Photoshop 4 for MAC and they haven’t been the same since because they have to support two platforms.
Hey Adobe, drop making software for 2% market share MACs and get back to your original platform: Microsoft Windows. Stop letting Cupertino from holding you back.
Your potential. Our passion.™
Flash will come to the iPhone when a need for it emerges.
-jcr
>”You don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube.
How about having Flash on the iPhone to view Flash-based websites? YouTube is cool, but so many sites (and their features) rely on Flash for good reason.
When’s Adobe getting off their lazy A $ $ and rewriting this crap bloatware called flash so that it’s actually better optimized and not such a waste of resources?
1. Flash is a cool technology
2. Unfortunately, it sucks up way more resources then it should for mobile usage and…
3. It is usually implemented in the most useless way possible.
Ever wonder why most Flash pages have “Skip this page” option? Cause if they didn’t you’d skip the entire website!
iPhone web usage is 50 times higher than all other platforms. Clearly, Flash is not a priority.