Unintentional Hilarity Ensues
April 22nd, 2010 - 11:20 am
Check out the lede from an Apple Insider report:
In a rare public comment, Apple’s public relations department responded…
Apple must be the only company in the world with a near-silent PR department. Other than maybe Blackwater.
The title of the article is “Apple strikes back at Adobe, says Flash is ‘closed and proprietary’”
WTH? And Apple isn’t ‘closed and proprietary’? Sure, they are ‘open’ if you sign their developer agreements, swear to toe their line, and don’t try to color outside the lines they’ve made for you. Do so, and you won’t be able to give your app away for free on their App Store.
One thing that rings false about the claims that we need ‘open standards’ like HTML5 to replace Adobe Flash is that HTML5 incorporates features that duplicates Flash innovation. Once it becomes the new standard, however, it will be years before it is significantly updated. In that time Flash or some other third-party will provide the capabilities that the HTML5 committee could never invent or devise given decades of committee meetings. Then some new version of HTML will incorporate those innovations in the next new major standards update.
That’s the key to Flash’s original success: it permitted web designers to color outside the lines the original HTML standard provided. There will always be a need for this kind of service. Either Adobe or some other innovator will provide it. The adoption of HTML5 will not magically eliminate the requirement for something that provides stuff that we never knew we needed.
“Once it becomes the new standard, however, it will be years before it is significantly updated. In that time Flash or some other third-party will provide the capabilities that the HTML5 committee could never invent or devise given decades of committee meetings.”
So you are saying that a centralized committee won’t be able to match its regulations to the pace of free market innovation? And as a result the rate of innovation is slowed? But surely the best and brightest could be brought together and…
Sorry, I just about choked trying to hold the giggles back.
Jaycephus,
Interesting and legit arg.
As someone who ‘gave her hard work away for free for fun’ at one time skinning windows GUI, creating animated cursors, creating icons and being an all around uber geek girl, I developed a keen sense of art vs. irony.
Now? I’m developing my own font foundry and trying to incorporate all I’ve learned via ‘skinning’ and ‘digi-art’ into other aspects of my (hopefully) successful career.
Unfortch ‘open standards’ are hackable as muchly as ‘closed’.
I wish I had an answer to intellectual thievery.
Apple doesn’t need a PR department. They’ve got AI, MacRumors, Gruber, Ihnatko, Gizmodo, etc.
And when that fails, they just crank up the RDF. That never fails to get 20+k words from Dilger. A day.
Why pay some flunky who has to come in 9-5 everyday, when you can get it for free? Especially when someone “loses” the next-gen iPhone….
Isn’t the Apple PR department where those guys get their info? On the down-low, of course…
It’s the way I’d do it, if I were Apple.
Which I’m not.
Obviously.