Steve Jobs has been in the news lately, partly involuntarily due to the mislaying of his next generation iPhone, and partly of his own volition.
His latest piece of communication came this morning with his long post explaining his opposition to Flash, the Adobe video product that he has banned from iPads.
The intriguing aspect of his missive is his insistence that Apple is more open than Adobe in its approach to mobile web standards. This is ironic, since Apple has faced criticism that it operates a closed platform with the iPhone, iPad and iTunes.
I argued in a recent column that Apple is less closed than it is often portrayed to be, while Google is less open. Both companies use a combination of open and closed technologies to exert power.
Consider in this context Mr Jobs’ thoughts on Flash:
Adobe’s Flash products are 100 per cent proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit, a complete open-source HTML5 rendering engine that is the heart of the Safari web browser used in all our products. WebKit has been widely adopted. Google uses it for Android’s browser, Palm uses it, Nokia uses it, and RIM (Blackberry) has announced they will use it too. Almost every smartphone web browser other than Microsoft’s uses WebKit. By making its WebKit technology open, Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers.
The description of Flash as “100 per cent proprietary” is tendentious but I agree with the overall thrust of the argument. Apple has supported open web standards, building its proprietary software and business around these – it has mixed the two approaches adroitly.
At times, Silicon Valley’s constant arguments about which company is the most open is reminiscent of Animal Farm, in which some animals were more equal than others. But the underlying point is that to describe Apple as a closed platform company underestimates its wiliness.
