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David Barnes
Jobs' latest act of villainy has less to do with Adobe than Gruber thinks.
John Gruber of Daring Fireballs reckons that Apple's recent developer agreement change is primarily a way of screwing over Adobe.
Now I'm sure Steve Jobs black heart did skip a few beats at the thought of screwing Adobe, but his latest act of villainy doesn't have as much to do with Adobe as Gruber thinks.
Adobe has a market cap less than 10% of Apple. It's small fry compared to Apple, and we can't expect Apple to care about them much. More important, Adobe is not an Apple competitor -- Adobe is not entering the smart phone market that is responsible for so much of Apple's recent growth.
Adobe is too small to deserve much attention from Apple right now. The "Apple vs. Adobe" war might have appealed to tweeters and bloggers, but in the board room it's like talking about the "US vs. Luxembourg" war.
So who's the target? It's Apple's real competitors in the mobile space: Microsoft, Google, Nokia.
Y'see, the real promise of Flash CS 5 or Unity 3D is that developers don't need to commit to the App Store. They can write their application once and deploy it anywhere they like. This is bad for Apple. If an app can be deployed anywhere, then developers can easily start porting their apps to Android or Windows Phone. Once they start doing that, one of the iPhone's strong selling points -- the huge size of the App Store -- disappears. Every platform has the same apps in the store, and they all run in the same way.
To hold onto its place, Apple needs developers to make a firm commitment to the App Store -- to use a native language that can't be ported easily.
Apple needs to keep developers closely tied to the iDevice platform. They want platform lock in.
Right now Apple is in a perfect position. To gain access to the many cheap apps on the App Store, you need an iDevice. To get access to the millions of iDevice holders, you need to be on the App Store. It's a Catch 22 with Apple raking in the profits.
But if those mobile apps can easily be deployed to any device, customers don't need to buy an iPhone to get the apps. A Windows Phone or Android will do just as well. And once customers move to other mobile platforms, the App Store becomes less important for developers, and Apple's greatest strength starts to erode.
The new Apple Developer Agreement forces all iPhone developers to make a commitment to the platform. If you want to be in the App Store, you have to write code especially for Apple devices. Otherwise, it ain't getting in.
Because Apple is far and away the strongest smart phone player today, any developer would be crazy to walk away from it. Apple's intention is to make sure things stay that way.
Posted
by David Barnes
