Collateral

Some of you may have seen the news that Apple has changed in TOS for iPhone OS developers, some of you may not. In a nutshell, the change means that Adobe’s plans to provide a way for Flash developers to compile and run their Flash projects on the iPhone, and distribute them through the App store have been stopped dead in their tracks. 

The Adobe community is understandably up in arms about the change. They feel cheated, and rightly so. They were promised something new, exciting and most importantly, profitable, only to have it snatched away at the last minute. Although in my opinion they’re blaming the wrong team. This isn’t Apple’s fault, it’s Adobes. 

Why Adobe thought it could announce and release this sort of functionality without even speaking to Apple begs belief. Apple and Adobe speak all the time, mainly so Adobe can ignore Apple’s software and hardware updates, but they speak none the less. So there’s no excuse for things to have gotten to this point…. unless of course it’s exactly what Adobe wanted to happen. Which it totally is. 

Back in reality world: Adobe knew this would happen. Apple have been clear from the word go about Flash on the iPhone; ‘Not gonna happen’. Adobe also know that any future updates to the iPhone OS could (and probably would) break any apps developed in Flash CS5. At this point Apple have to wait for Adobe to bring their own platform up to speed, which as they’ve demonstrated time and again in the past is not something they’re really all that into doing. So Adobe suddenly gain control of Apples development timeline which would be a cluster-fuck doomsday scenario of the highest order. In geek terms at least. Most other people probably wouldn’t even notice.

Adobe also know that end users don’t know and don’t care what language was used to create their iPhone fart apps or iPhone flash light apps so when apps created in Flash CS5 start crashing and generally screwing up the end user experience it’s Apple that takes the flack, not Adobe. 

Adobe have behaved in a way that (from my point of view at least) is irresponsible, unprofessional and shows utter contempt for their own user base. It is Adobe that promised something it knew it would not deliver and it is Adobe encouraging it’s user base to rally against Apple in what can only be described as a smear campaign. This is PR of the lowest order that uses Adobe’s customers as pawns in a game of chess they know they wont win. Although it will at least do some token damage to Apple’s image which I guess Adobe thinks is like, totally worth it. 

So allow me to misquote Lee Brimelow, one of Adobe’s platform evangelists by signing off like this… “Go screw yourself Adobe.”