Something Fishy in Flash Town

There’s something fishy about this whole flashgate saga that’s been going on for the last week or so. Ever since Apple published the new terms and agreements for iPhone OS4, the web has exploded in outrage. Much of that outrage stems from the very public temper tantrum by Adobe’s flash evangelist Lee Brimlow. His reaction, and those of many Adobe supporters could be best summed up as shock, disbelief and anger. It’s the shock part that I have a problem with. To me, that reaction is somewhat suspicious, especially from an Adobe employee. Why? For the simple reason that I can’t believe that they didn’t see this coming.

Apple made it pretty clear that they didn’t want Flash on the iPhone. So Adobe goes and does an end run around Apple and announce, not only a way to bring flash to the platform in a round about way, but to bypass Apple’s developer tools all together. They didn’t do this with Apple’s approval, they sprung it on them like they did everyone else. They could have worked with Apple to let flash help create interfaces or animations that worked with Apple’s developer tools and helped developers, but instead they tried to bypass Apple all together. Anyone who’s ever followed Apple knows that that’s not something you want to do, so I really can’t believe that anyone at Adobe is shocked by this. They musty have known that Apple wasn’t going to take this lying down. Lee Brimlow expresses his anger at Cupertino by saying “Screw you Apple”, but Flash CS5 was already a big “Screw You” to Apple and Adobe knows it.

As Louis Gerbarg points out:

Adobe is a large company with a significant, and complicated, relationship with Apple. They have frequent high level contacts and meetings. Adobe has known for quite some time about Apple’s desire not to have Flash on the iPhone. There is no doubt in my mind that if they asked Apple to bless this they were rebuffed, and if they didn’t ask the only reason they didn’t was because they knew Apple would say no.

Some Adobe supporters are crying foul about the timing of Apple’s rule change, but again, there’s no way Adobe didn’t know about this or at the very least suspect it. I’d be willing to bet that when the Flash packager was announced a while ago someone at Adobe got a call from someone at Apple and it wasn’t pretty.

The worst thing about this is the way that Adobe are trying to claim the moral high ground and claim that they are only trying to forward the interests of developers, and some people are actually believing them. If Adobe only have developer’s interests at heart then why do they continually screw over their customers in Europe and elsewhere.

My guess is that they figured if they created enough of a public outrage then Apple would be forced to capitulate, just as they have in the past when developers felt like their Apps had been unfairly banned from the App Store. But there’s a big difference between a single developer venting their frustration on their blog and a big corporation trying to publicly embarrass another into doing their bidding.

Louis Gerbarg’s excellent article has a similar conclusion, but he puts it much more eloquently than I have…

..they announced the product to their customers and sold them on an idea they were not in a position to deliver, hoping Apple would be unwilling to piss off developers by not fulfilling Adobe’s promises. They tried to force Apple’s hand by putting Apple in a position where in order stop the Flash they would have to do it publicly in front of Adobe’s users

This isn’t the first time that Adobe has tried a stunt like this either. When their attempts to get flash on the iPhone were rebuffed they programmed the flash player to display a message publicly blaming and berating Apple in an obvious attempt to shame Apple into supporting flash. That didn’t work out too well either. Adobe put a lot of money into it’s merger with Macromedia in order to get flash and control content on the web. Now after all their work, the relevance of flash is being threatened and they are undoubtedly not pleased about that. I suspect that because of their market position and dominance over the content creation industry, Adobe expected Apple to just roll over and accept their demands out of fear of Adobe’s user base. Whether it was arrogance or naivety that led them down this road, of all the companies you don’t want to get into a pissing contest with, Apple is number one.

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