Adobe’s One-sided Love Affair with Apple

Apple is very clear of how it wants developers to develop applications for its products, such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. It wants developers to use its well-documented APIs in the manner it prescribes. Thus, it wants applications to be developed ONLY in C or C++ that could well be executed by the iPhone OS WebKit Engine.

In other words, Apple still wants to shun Adobe’s Creative Suite that includes Flash, which is currently being used for displaying more than 90 percent of online videos.

Apple, since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, has been shutting Adobe out of its value chain, even though Adobe has consistently been trying to woo Apple by sending very clear signals! For example, the new Adobe Creative Suite 5, which is expected to be unleashed soon at Adobe’s annual developers conference, has features that will give developers the ability to produce applications in a format that can work on the iPhone and iPad. But, Apple’s new developer agreement makes it succinctly clear that Apple is not going to accept Adobe’s courtship!

But, the obvious questions are: Why does Apple want to hurt Adobe? Why does Apple want to keep Adobe out of its value chain? Won’t doing so hurt Apple too? Won’t blank-holes be there when Apple customers browse the Internet, using Apple devices? What is going to fill in there, if not Flash-based videos, which already are prevalent all over the Internet?

The answers to these so-called obvious questions could perhaps be like these: No, perhaps, Apple purposely doesn’t want to hurt Adobe, but, definitely, wants to hold on to its highly enthusiastic developers firmly, raising the costs of switching for them. And, yes, doing so is hurting Apple too, but not much, as content-providers are slowly moving from Flash to HTML5, which is an open-source standard, and works fine for Apple. So, hopefully soon, there won’t be many blank-holes for Apple’s customers.

Oh yea, Apple has its own way of saying a big NO! But, it is just playing safe, as it knows what might pop up, if it lets Adobe come close to it – and to its products, services, “hegemony” over its entire spectrum of value chain, revenues, and bottom line, of course! :-)