My wife Alicia and I enjoy watching country music award shows because they are packed full of great artists singing popular songs that we like. So, we snuggled up on the sofa on Sunday evening, April 18 to watch the Academy of Country Music Awards broadcast live from MGM on CBS and hosted by Reba McEntire.
When Reba announced that the Entertainer of the Year award was going to be selected by online voting, I told Alicia, “This is great. I’ll just get our iPad, and we can sit here on the sofa, watch the show and vote at the same time.” When I got the iPad, I opened up the Safari browser and went to the show’s web site and then selected the voting link. Wham! Just like that the entire process came to a halt. A big message came up on the screen: “Need to install Adobe Flash.” We were dead in the water. We couldn’t vote because Apple and Adobe are at odds over the use of Flash on Apple’s mobile devices.
There’s been a lot of online debate about the issue of whether Apple should or shouldn’t support Adobe Flash. After all, Flash is used on something like 80% of all web sites and is, therefore, very important to hundreds of millions of people. When there’s something as popular as a nationwide TV show with tens of millions of people watching and Apple declares that Flash can’t run on the iPad, it’s just plain wrong.
Apple tries to justify its position. They say Flash is a closed system, that it’s slow, that it reduces battery life, that it’s buggy, and so it goes. On the other hand, Adobe has the entire web development community on its side. The actual users, however, seem to have disappeared from the discussion. Hundreds of millions of people don’t care about the warring factions. They just want to use their computers, iPhones and iPads and not have to be drawn into diversionary political processes that prevent them from using their systems to get work done – or, to vote for the ACM Entertainer of the Year using their iPad while sitting on the sofa – just as Apple CEO Steve Jobs envisioned.
I believe that one of the reasons Flash has become so popular is because it greatly improves the user experience by allowing interaction, multi-media and cool graphics to operate on the Web screen and, thus, making it operate much like a local PC/Mac application.
There have been suggestions that HTML 5.0 will incorporate many of the features that are now incorporated in Flash. I’m sure that Adobe will add more capabilities to their next version of Flash to continue to make it an attractive development platform. Developers tell me they believe that Adobe is partly to blame for the problems and needs to improve Flash as a development platform and change (open up) their licensing strategy - make it more like Adobe Acrobat that everyone admires and supports.
When major disagreements happen in the world, the best thing to do is to get the parties together, sit down and calmly workout an acceptable resolution. In the Mid-East, warring parties have held a number of formal summits that have opened up dialogue and reduced tensions. The focus of a Peace Summit is to create solutions instead of continuing with hostilities.
Therefore, I would like to call for a Flash Peace Summit to be held as soon as possible at a neutral location in Silicon Valley such as the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara or the Fairmont in San Jose. Both Apple and Adobe could send up to 10 representatives including Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Shantanu Narayan, CEO of Adobe. I’d also recommend that a panel of 10 technology experts be there to offer their recommendations on how best to solve the problem. John Murrell of the San Jose Mercury News and author of Good Morning Silicon Valley would be an excellent MC and could select the 10 technology experts to attend the Summit.
I’d recommend that each side get an hour in the morning to state their case and the third hour would be given to the panel of technology experts who would present their recommended solution to the problem. Then, over lunch, Apple and Adobe would comment on what they would need changed in the recommended solution in order to support the recommendation by the panel of experts. The final solution should include both technical and financial issues.
An agreement would then be put together by the technology panel of experts, and final concurrence reached in the afternoon. Finally, John Murrell would chair a press conference where Steve Jobs and Shantanu Narayan would sign the agreement just like President Obama does with constituencies who support a bill in Congress.
Hopefully, these two executives could agree to include a way for all Apple mobile devices to support (perhaps a modified version of) Flash, to provide developers with (perhaps an altered version of) Flash for creating iPhone and iPad applications, and -- finally -- agree to work together for the good of the customer to resolve any future problems.
Apple, you’ve been the darling of computer technology. You’ve been loved and admired. But, you really need to watch out for being sidetracked by Google with Android and HP with Palm which are all based on open Web standards. They wouldn’t think of not supporting Flash. Oh yeah, one more thing (smile), everyone will admire Apple & Adobe for finding an acceptable solution that will allow users to operate web sites and mobile apps that use Flash. Your stock price will go up and the love fest will continue.
This would go down in technology history as a very important day. Please Apple – and please Adobe – find a way to resolve this nasty situation. I would hate to think what would happen if the Federal Government would to be forced to intervene and resolve the matter.
To my friends at Apple and Adobe: Make us all proud that disagreements like this can be resolved without outside intervention.
Written By:
J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
Principal Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
MobileTrax LLC
gerry.purdy@mobiletrax.com
404-406-5309
Disclosure Statement: From time to time, I may have a direct or indirect equity position in a company that is mentioned in this column. If that situation happens, then I’ll disclose it at that time.