Apple’s Reasons Behind No Flash: 75% Smartphone Marketshare
The recent hoopla over the iPhone is one of the more interesting developments in Apple's history. With Apple there has always been a tension between open and closed. Invariably, whether it is the tentative and then stopped experiment with clones, or Apple's approach to iTunes, Apple has erred on the side of closed.
As everyone now famously knows, this has cost Apple big in the past. The best example is Windows, which could have been Apple's game had Steve Jobs been more open, and allowed the cloning market to happen earlier on. Instead the personal and professional computer market is dominated by Microsoft Windows, which is essentially a clone of the Mac OS; we all use Windows, but Apple doesn't get the benefit.
In hindsight this could be viewed as an incredibly stupid move by Apple. Or, it could be viewed as the thing that makes Apple Apple; no compromise around product design. I owned a Power Computing machine and at the time, as a student, it was awesome to get a similarly speced Mac for a few hundred bucks less. But the thing was ugly in a PC-hardware kind of way, but this didn't really matter. However, it does now.
The Competitive Advantage Writ Large:
The difference today is that the integration of software and hardware is Apple's sole competitive advantage. It allows the company to create incredible products, like the iPhone that no one else can, except to look back at the iPhone and copy it. Android? A clone much like Windows was to the Mac. Windows Phone 7 (not sure what it is called, they keep changing it), with it's "pinch and zoom browser" and "marketplace"? A clone.
In order to keep pace with the market, and keep the 2-3 year advantage that Apple currently has with the iPhone, Apple has to keep innovating. This is made easier by Apple's in-house ability to design and implement on the hardware and software layer (Google does not make its phones, neither will Microsoft). However another very key differentiator has emerged—the incredibly explosive iPhone application ecosystem.
Like with the mp3 player market prior to the iPod, elements on the app market idea existed whether it was Microsoft's failed Window's mobile strategy or the various carrier's attempts to create lock-down stores. But the iPhone App ecosystem is on a whole new scale, with well over 100,000 applications. The innovation, iFart apps notwithstanding, is staggering. And the reason for this innovation? An open store architecture (albeit, ironically, within the closed confines of Apple) where anyone, from an individual developer to a large company can write and deploy an application.
This app store is, as much as the creativity Apple brings to the OS and hardware design of the iPhone and now iPad, intrinsic to Apple's success and it must do what it needs to protect it.
The threat, in this case, is developers who view the iPhone as just another device for which to deploy an application. They want one development environment, whether it is Adobe CS 5, or Unity, where they can use one code base, hit print, and have a bunch of Apps. This is great (in theory) for the developer, but not great for Apple, and ultimately not for the end users either.
Why? Because it creates vanilla applications. Vanilla apps run everywhere but do not take advantage of what is specific to the iPhone platform. The UI won't be iPhone specific. The code will not take advantage of new innovations in the iPhone OS, like the specific way it will handle multi-tasking with 4.0. If anyone can create cross-platform apps easily the reason to have and use an iPhone is diminished.
Ultimately, this isn't about Apple selling more Macs, it is about Apple dominating mobile. The mobile market will be a lot harder to dominate than the mp3 player market, but look at Apple's position in that market; the iPod makes up about 75% of portable digital music players.
I truly believe 75% marketshare is Apple's long-term goal with the iPhone. They want it to be the dominant mobile phone platform. And the only way to do this is to differentiate. This means no me-too crappy Flash applications in the app store. This means no vanilla apps that are copies that run on multiple platforms. If you are a developer and you want to have an application on the iPhone App store it has to be an iPhone App.
End of story.
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If the developers don’t like the rules, then they should not play the game.
Well said, Hadley. (and Parky)
FireFox is a great case in point. Certainly a great application, but on the Mac, it’s not a proper native Mac app, so doesn’t take advantage of everything OS X offers apps. Such as the dictionary - man I miss that every time I’m in FireFox. Plus many services (all?)
And if an app is crappy or buggy, who did users blame? Usually they blame the device.
I know Apple just wants to shore (sure?) up its own kingdom, but this is one battle I want them to win. Because worse than Apple having a restricted platform is Adobe owning the rich content creation on the web.
We’ve got to keep the web free of proprietary standards.
This “openness killed the Mac” line has been tossed around for so long now that people have come to accept it as gospel truth.
In truth openness did not kill the Mac. (Okay, stunted really but ‘killed’ is more dramatic.) Two things killed the Mac: One, IBM’s overpowering prestige in the corporate world and two, Sculley’s greedy, short-sighted decision to sell the Mac at insanely high prices. Bear with me here.
Back in 1981, corporate desktop computing was at its infancy, Apple was a young company run by a pair of hippies. There is no freaking way that a Fortune 500 IT purchasing manager was going to recommend Apple II’s over the new IBM PC. Just no way. But would anyone here claim that an IT manager picked IBM because the IBM PC was an ‘open’ machine? Of course not, they picked IBM because it is IBM, the company whose institutional knowledge of business computing dwarfs everyone else’s, the company with the rock solid financial footing that will be around to support their products well into the next millenium. So let’s throw that ‘openness made the IBM PC a winner’ canard. Even if IBM kept the PC closed, they would still have dominated corporate desktop computing which then flowed into domination of home computing.
Let’s move on up to 1984. The Mac comes out. It’s a positively revolutionary innovation that made computing a lot easier and more accessible to the non-geek customer. It’s still going to be hard to go up against Big Blue, but maybe you have a fighting chance with the snazzy new interface. But what does Sculley do? Insanely high prices for the Mac! Hooray, Tiffany pricing for the “computer for the rest of us”! Instant niche product! The Mac became a runt not because it was ‘closed’ but because it was overpriced. Not only was it overpriced, it was overpriced when it had no right to be given that the main competitor was Big Blue. So we’ll never know if the Mac would have succeeded if it pursued the right pricing strategy but we do know it wasn’t closed-ness that killed it.
Now, let’s think about openness some more. Aside from desktop (and laptop) computing, in the history of modern commerce, has there ever been any other successful technologically complex, mass consumption product that pursued an open strategy? Cars? Radios? TVs? Game consoles? MP3 players? Let’s go a little lower tech. Fridges? Toasters? Dishwashers? None!
There was a role for openness in PCs though. Openness allowed Microsoft to wrest control of the industry from IBM. Openness made it possible for Microsoft to cultivate the PC clone market which turned IBM into just another hardware manufacturer thus forcing them to relinquish control of the industry to Microsoft.
So let’s put this openness-is-the-best-strategy myth once and for all. And if anyone still stubbornly believes in it, I give you desktop Linux.
Oh and by the way, other than my near-rant about openness. I think the article was spot on, not that my opinion should matter one bit to anyone. As a dominant smart phone seller, 3rd party development tools would benefit rival smart phones at Apple’s expense. To cement and expand their dominance, Apple absolutely has to shoot down these 3rd party tools now, while Apple is still the most profitable and thus first choice for app developers. They have to do that to fulfill their fiduciary obligations towards the shareholders.
> As everyone now famously knows, this has cost Apple big in the past. The best example
> is Windows, which could have been Apple’s game had Steve Jobs been more open, and
> allowed the cloning market to happen earlier on.
Beware of assuming “what everyone knows”. They used to “know” the earth was flat.
This to me, is like saying, “if only Apple were Microsoft”, then the MacOS would be Windows.
... Somehow, I doubt it. Windows was always going to happen. It was driven by the enterprise market; whereas Apple has always targeted the consumer market.
There’s always going to be a least common denominator—and it was never going to be an Apple product. Corporate molds are cast from the beginning. Microsoft was founded on deceit, misappropriation, and predatory practices from Day 1.
Read the history, and form your own opinion. That’s mine.
Sunny Guy
I agree with your conclusion, Hadley. I merely disagree with your history lesson. Do you remember OS/2? It was a pretty good OS; it could have competed well against the classic Mac OS; It was much better than Windows 95. Microsoft misled people into developing for OS/2 and then shot it down. That was how Microsoft got its monopoly by sabotaging any competitor to Microsoft Windows and Office. The IT personnel in big businesses allowed Microsoft to get away with that anti-competitive behavior. It was a closed system.
It wasn’t a lack of openness which relegated the Mac to a niche; Wintel was not open on the Operating System side. Apple’s board of directors were greedy; they milked the Apple II and the Mac for every dime they could get. Apple was not delivering sufficient value, or technological improvements, to compete with Wintel computers who were competing on the lowest possible price and the highest megahertz.
That relatively higher Apple price you speak of, tundraboy, allowed Microsoft to steal the march on Apple. Windows 95 was junk compared to the Mac OS, but a Wintel computer costs half or less of an Apple. If you did not have high requirements or wanted a long life expectancy, then Wintel could do almost as well. The Windows OS was said to be “good enough.”
What does openness mean? Linux is totally open OS, but that means that it has no direction. It has too many conflicting visions. Google may be in the process of making Linux into a success by closing it down more with the Chrome OS, but it is too soon to say.
Apple is providing direction for the mobile phone market; that is why it is successful. It is the industry leader. It is creating products which serve the customer’s long term needs, not the developer’s short term needs. Developers who come from Linux side often resent the lack of anarchy and attempt to force Apple into Linux’s open mode. That would destroy Apple’s vision for the future.
I believe in competition. Let the best system win: open or closed. Apple has a partially closed system because it is betting on certain technologies and controlling its vision. It will allow developers to come along on its ride so long as they don’t try to grab the steering wheel.
Both Microsoft and Adobe have their heads stuck in the past when Apple was weaker than they. This is no longer true. They do not control the shots. It is unclear how this recent brouhaha will pan out, but Apple is in no hurry to change anything substantial. Flash will not be on the iPhone. Apple needs to refine its position on Unity, Lua and the other runtime programs through.
“Why? Because it creates vanilla applications. Vanilla apps run everywhere but do not take advantage of what is specific to the iPhone platform.”
I can imagine other companies with ridiculous anti-competitive practices, but I can’t anyone justifying it the way the fanboys do with Apple.
If Apple has a problem with crappy apps (and clearly they don’t), then screen for THAT instead of the software used to create it.
This is about one thing and one thing only, punishing Adobe. Apple can do that because they have a monopolistic position. That’s not only anti-competitive, but it is exactly the kind of policies that Apple fanboys railed against when Microsoft did it.
Now they can’t defend it fast enough. I shudder to think of what would have happened if Apple had won the OS war.
Apple does not have a monopoly, Beeblebrox. There is plenty of competition in music players, mobile phones and internet appliances. Apple entered each of these markets as a novice—an underdog. Apple earned its market share by pleasing customers better then the existing vendors did. If Apple screws up or become unnecessarily dictatorial, it will lose out very rapidly. There is no lack of competition. It seems like we have en iPhone killer every month.
The point is that Apple owns and controls the iPod / iPhone / iPad software platform; therefore, it controls the path which that platform will take. Nor is this anti-competitive. If Flash is considered essential by iPod / iPhone /iPad users, then Apple will take a hit from that. If Apple is right and Flash is nonessential to its buyers then it will lose nothing.
The problem is that Apple has very poor competition in these markets. Therefore, it is the developers who must attack Apple. This is a very weak hand. What the developers want to do is share in Apple’s success, while simultaneously sabotaging Apple’s plans for the future.
The problem with Microsoft Windows is not that it controls 89% of the market, but that it is such a crappy, insecure OS. There are institutional reasons which maintain Microsoft’s Market share, but that won’t last forever.
The cracks are starting to widen. I can see three ways in which Microsoft’s market share will fall over the next ten years, but there are too many forces in play to know how it will happen.
Apple does not have a monopolistic position in the smart phone market. Any argument that flows from that false premise is dead on arrival. To exercise monopolistic behavior you have to first be a monopolist. And no, there is no such thing as an iPhone monopoly. Or a Coca-Cola monopoly. Or even a Windows 7 monopoly.
Apple’s position in the smart phone market is that of ‘most desirable product’ and there are no antitrust hypotheses, theories, or statutes that make being in that position a basis for regulation or population. Otherwise we would be in the position of punishing companies for selling great product.
Sheesh.
Your argument is superficially attractive, but ultimately incorrect I believe. To apply a political analogy, Apple is following the communist approach, where Big Brother knows what’s best for the application developer and user. The alternative is the capitalist Free Market approach, where the consumer decides what applications are worth keeping and which are not.
Ultimately if the “vanilla” Flash-based applications are bad and the Objective-C/Cocoa applications are excellent, the market will reflect that and people will vote with their wallets. Absolutely no need for Apple to dictate.
That said, if someone is able to write a good application using some intermediate standard, good luck to them! Indeed, by Apple restricting the developers to using only Apple tools, Apple is ultimately limiting competition in the developer tool space and preventing others from perhaps developing better development solutions. Whether Adobe or someone else is in a position to develop better tools is highly debatable, but my main point is that the market should decide, not Apple.
Indeed the biggest obstacle to this at present is the organizational mess known as the App Store (more like an App yard sale) - it may have 100000 applications, but how on earth do you find the one you want, and identify the better applications? If Apple focused their efforts on providing a better interface to the app store then the rest would take care of itself - and they’d probably sell more applications to boot.
Paul Howard said:
“Ultimately if the “vanilla” Flash-based applications are bad and the Objective-C/Cocoa applications are excellent, the market will reflect that and people will vote with their wallets. Absolutely no need for Apple to dictate. “
Apple needs to dictate, because it will get blamed for allowing poor products to be sold in the App store. The App store is not a Free Market any more than a Flea Market is, because restrictions always apply.
Apple is acting as a middlemen in its ownership of the App store. Middlemen stand between the customers and the producers to moderate the demands and excesses of both. They create the marketplace by providing a selling space and establishing the rules. Rules lead to order, because disputes always arise. The question is always “who administers the rules?”
A marketplace is “Free” according to how little the government involves itself and the owners of property decide. If the middlemen enforce quality standards then that insures that customers aren’t being ripped off. That protects the brand name of the store.
This seems to be what Apple is doing. Apple is taking the position that “native applications” using “open” standards are preferable to “cross platform applications” using “proprietary” standards.
“Whether Adobe or someone else is in a position to develop better tools is highly debatable, but my main point is that the market should decide, not Apple. “
The market is deciding, Paul. This isn’t a consumer squabble. It is a producer rebellion. It is Apple saying to its vendors, “You must sell according to my rules, if you are setting up shop in my App store.”
We can quibble over Apple’s dictates and whether Apple’s vision of the platform’s future is appropriate, but some people are saying that Apple has no right, as a Middleman, to control its own property. That the developers should set the rules in Apple’s store.
That is not so. The developers who believe that should go elsewhere—or stay with Linux.
“Indeed the biggest obstacle to this at present is the organizational mess known as the App Store (more like an App yard sale) - it may have 100000 applications, but how on earth do you find the one you want, and identify the better applications? “
Markets tend to become more orderly over time even as the number of producers increase. A market in information about the products arises; rating agencies and reviewers are developed to help people decide.
A lot of this mess will shake out with time. Word of mouth will select the good products and drive the bad ones out of business. Some of this commotion is from the App store’s newness. Some of it is from “fly by night” developers who want to rip people off.
Apple stands in the middle enforcing its quality standards. It is getting lambasted for that.
“If Apple focused their efforts on providing a better interface to the app store then the rest would take care of itself - and they’d probably sell more applications to boot.”
Can you make up your mind? Now, you are asking Apple to assert even more control over its property.
You are right; Apple needs to refine its interface for its customers. But, how can Apple do that when the developers are introducing disorder by grasping away control?
UrbanBard - there is a big difference between asking Apple to tidy up its store front so I can see what I might want to buy; and asking Apple to dictate to me what I may and may not buy. I’ve read your defense, but I really can’t agree. Software quality on the Mac seems to have not suffered with the free market and Apple has not felt a need to dictate to Mac owners what they can and can’t run on their computers or that software can only be bought from them. I can’t see why the iPad should be any different. The best thing Apple can do to ensure quality software is to continue to develop rich application frameworks and powerful development tools. That is their competitive advantage. If they get that right, they won’t need to police their market place as developers will want to use their tools because they’re the best, not because they’re the only option.
Paul, the App Store is a work in process. No doubt, it will change over time in order to satisfy the consumers needs. Apple has an embarrassment of riches in its App store. It probably never knew the store would grow this fast, therefore it never made plans for expansion.
“I’ve read your defense, but I really can’t agree. Software quality on the Mac seems to have not suffered with the free market and “
Apple never controlled a market before; computers grew like topsy in often unfriendly ways for customers and developers. Apple had a niche market, so it could concentrate on pleasing reasonable professionals. But even then, Apple had many problems with developers.
“Apple has not felt a need to dictate to Mac owners what they can and can’t run on their computers or that software can only be bought from them. “
That is silly. Apple often has had to dictate to Mac owners in order to improve its OS. Apple told the developers for three years, in Mac OS 8, to stop making direct calls to hardware. Eventually, Apple had to cut the practice even though that broke programs. Who got blamed? The Developers? Dream on.
Apple had a devil of a time converting its users and developers to Mac OSX even though its users knew the benefits of a modern, object oriented, operating system. Apple had to create the Carbon API’s as the only means to move the developers and users to Cocoa API’s. We are still four years away from Carbon API’s becoming obsolete.
Most recently, Apple had been telling developers, several years before the move to Intel hardware, to use Xcode and Cocoa API’s. Adobe refused. It tried to coerce Apple into creating Carbon 64 bit API’s, so it could cross compile programs, until Apple cut them off. Adobe has blamed Apple for being a year and a half late in converting CS to 64 bit.
“I can’t see why the iPad should be any different. “
What make the iPad platform different is the multi-touch technologies. You cannot simply transfer a Wintel app to the iPad and expect it to work well. Apple had to extensively reprogram iWorks to get the programs to be effortless.
Also, Apple may be nipping problems in the bud by being strict now. Apple can afford to be strict, because it has more developers than it needs.
The Wintel software marketplace is atrocious; it is not efficient. 80% of all apps are stolen. This means that developers must price their apps five times as high to gain a decent profit. It was never that bad in Macintosh software, but Macintosh users are very demanding and are less likely to be thieves. The word spread when an application wasn’t good or very Mac-like.
The App store Is an efficient marketplace, because Apple polices it. It isn’t perfect, but the small developers can make a living on it. Apple didn’t have such a marketplace before. I’m expecting Apple to extend the store to regular apps when it gets its infrastructure worked out.
“The best thing Apple can do to ensure quality software is to continue to develop rich application frameworks and powerful development tools. “
What if you can’t get lazy developers to use your wonderful tools? What if they want to sell crappy knockoffs of programs they designed for Windows? Adobe, for instance, designed Flash to work very well and fast on Windows, but extremely poorly and problematically on the Mac. Who gets blamed for that situation? Not Adobe.
“If they get that right, they won’t need to police their market place as developers will want to use their tools because they’re the best, not because they’re the only option.”
You have a naive view of the world. You must have police because there are malefactors.
Apple could have the best tools in the world, but some people, out of self interest or blindness, will choose something else. What Apple is demanding on the iPad is native applications using open technologies. This is mostly aimed at Adobe, but Apple needs to elaborate on how it intends to respond to runtime programs.
Apple Reverse Cell Phone Lookup had a devil of a time converting its users and developers to Mac OSX even though its users knew the benefits of a modern, object oriented, operating system. Apple had to create the Carbon API’s as the only means to move the developers and users to Cocoa API’s. We are still four years away from Carbon API’s becoming obsolete.
“The best thing Apple can do to ensure quality software is to continue to develop rich application frameworks and powerful development tools. “
Apple had to create the Carbon API’s as the only means to move the developers and users to Cocoa API’s.
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