Ending Apple And Adobe's Feud

The current feud between Apple and Adobe is like all clashes of titans, in that it's the little people who get hurt. Those little people are the owners of Apple 's iPhone and iPad, and they are unable to watch an enormous percentage of the videos posted on the Internet. Being a little person myself, I'd like nothing more than for the two sides to come to an understanding, and am hereby making available my good offices, along with a proposed compromise.

The issue is an Adobe software called Flash, which does many things, most notably letting Web surfers view streaming video inside a browser window. (As opposed to downloading the file and then playing it with something like Windows Media Player.) For a long time, this was the easiest way for Web sites to deliver video, and Flash has been almost universally adopted. If you watch videos online--Hulu, Failblog, what have you--you are watching Flash.

Flash doesn't just do video, though; it's a kind of mini-operating system, meaning that programmers can write, for example, a Flash-based game that will play inside a browser window. These, too, are enormously popular.

Apple , however, is currently on a jihad against Flash, for both good and bad reasons. At internal companies meetings, Steve Jobs has been quoted as complaining that Flash software is slow and buggy and the source of an exceptionally high number of Mac computers crashes. Web sites that want to stream video should use a relatively new technology called HTML 5, which allows video without the need for Flash. Web sites have been slow to move to HTML 5 because browsers like Internet Explorer don't yet support it; that won't happen until next year.

Adobe champions Flash because its main product lines are aimed at developers; the tools allow a programmer to write a Flash application that will run on many different gadgets. But that is precisely what worries Apple, which frets that Flash apps will be generic, low-common denominator programs that will degrade the Apple software "ecosystem" by not taking advantage of the unique hardware of the iPhone and iPad.

While Steve Jobs is certainly capable of being peevish and capricious, his criticisms have the ring of truth. So, too, does his knock that Adobe has stopped being innovative; indeed, the company's idea of innovation seems to involve shovelware-style expensive new versions of its legacy programs like Adobe and Illustrator. (Cramming in new features is the default strategy of companies that don't have better ideas.)

In the meantime, though, the world's growing millions of iPhone owners and the growing hundreds of thousands of iPad owners, have huge swaths of the Web closed off to them. Hence, this entirely reasonable suggestion for a compromise: A mini version of Flash that only handles video.

Apple engineers could help with its development, to ensure that whatever legitimate performance issues they had were accommodated. And Adobe would agree to take out of this version of Flash the extra functionality that allows it to run programs in addition to showing videos. This obviously is less than ideal from Adobe's perspective, but it's vastly more than it is getting right now.

A year or two from now, all this will be but a bad memory. HTML 5 will be everywhere; Web sites will have converted their video to be compatible with it; Apple and Adobe will be arguing about something else. But a year is an awfully long time to wait, especially with all the cute cat videos demanding viewership right this second.

See Also:

Prognosticating The Apple iTube

Apple Takes On Intel

Apple Joins The Mouse Masses