It’s all about money and nothing else
I had vowed not to write about it when the whole iPhone/Flash mess started to unfold.
Because of recent developments and because nobody ever talked about the real truth, I’m going to have to break that vow.
Do you want to know why Flash will never be on the iPhone/iPad and why OS 4.0 changes the developer agreement?
It’s all about money!
Flash may be resource intensive, it may even be a CPU-hog, but those are not the reasons why Steve does not want it on it’s platform. There are hundreds of thousands Flash games out there. The vast majority of video delivery on the web is still driven by Flash. Apple does not want all those resources to become available on their platform for free – they want a chunk of every single game, every single song and every single movie that is being delivered to their devices. And the only way to get that chunk of money is by making things exclusively available through iTunes. So Apple will do everything to reduce the number of ways that you and I, as Apple users, can get our hands on content that is not coming from one of their online stores.
Let’s say hypothetically that the Flash Player had a feature that would send a fingerprint of the currently playing video or song to the iTunes store and would offer a simple way how people could purchase that video or song from the same store. No matter how resource intensive, no matter what a CPU hog, the Flash Player would be bundled with every single Apple device – no questions asked.
I’m sick of all this hypocritical bullshit that Apple’s direction only has the user in mind and that their every move is only to benefit the customer. All they want is to milk the cow as much as possible. If they continue down that path they’ll rip off the udder sooner or later.
April 9th, 2010 at 8:16 am
Umm, Tobias, you just now figuring this out? And as a result of this strategy, Apple stock is exactly twice per share what it was a year ago today.
April 9th, 2010 at 8:26 am
No, I think I figured that out the moment the news broke
Of course the market is going to like it, if AAPL’s profits are climbing through the roof. The market also liked it when MSFT turned itself into a monopoly. However, the market did not like it when MSFT got slapped on their fingers for it.
History is repeating itself.
April 9th, 2010 at 8:41 am
I think Apple is in a better position vs. monopoly charges. No one has to buy an Apple product. Just about everyone did have to buy Windows.
I like Apple products very much and think their sessions, like yesterday’s, are the ultimate in marketing demand. But yes they are control freaks — and for more than just profit I believe. It may just be that it is only the people in the IT business (widely construed) that care. Flash is indifferent to the end user.