Peace plans for the Adobe-Apple Flash war? Hellno.

Let there be blood

By John Cox on Thu, 05/13/10 - 8:32am.

There is now, not one, but two, very very very civilized "peace plans" to bring an end to the increasingly bitter public fight between Adobe and Apple on how to play those videos in your Web browser. Is this really necessary?

As they say in the great state of Maine, "Hellno."

Let there be blood.

Let Apple CEO Steve Jobs continue ranting that Adobe Flash, the plugin for interactive multimedia in browsers is a "CPU hog" and the company that makes it is "lazy" and the HTML5 standard is The Way. Let Adobe execs warn that Jobs is the 21st Century techno Big Brother of Orwell's novel "1984," a threat to the economy, and "totally counter to the Web."

The first Let There Be Peace plan was set forth by our colleagues at InfoWorld. Galen Gruman worries that the spat may grow into a "major industry rift" in part because "Apple is on a mission to kill Flash." He doesn't like the fact that Apple's Steve Jobs banned Flash from Apple's mobile devices. Bad for the mobile Web, and all that.

"By barring Flash from the most popular and exciting mobile devices in existence, Apple denies developers and users an opportunity to create and consume applications that can provide a consistent user experience across platforms," Gruman writes.

Let's be honest: that lacks the ringing Marxian rabble-rousing impact of "iPhone users of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your inability to consume applications that can provide a consistent user experience across platforms!"

"At InfoWorld.com, we believe such lockouts of technology, however well rationalized, could eventually lead to an Internet future of multiple, incompatible platforms that demand multiple proprietary technologies."

The horror of Multiples. Exceeded only by the horror of Proprietariness.

"Both sides need to compromise; this is not simply a matter of Steve Jobs opening his platform to Flash. Adobe must take a step toward openness as well and help ensure that developers create Flash apps that are secure, stable, and suited to mobile use."

This is the kind of "on the one hand and on the other hand" whimsy on which founder so many wrong-headed, well-meaning, wooly-minded peace "plans": everyone's right, really, so why can't we all just get along?

"No matter how superior the iPhone OS is, people don't like bullies and will go elsewhere as soon as they can," Gruman concludes.

This is clearly factually wrong. First, Steve Jobs doesn't wake up at night in a cold sweat, worrying that anyone is going to think he's a bully. He. Doesn't. Care. Second, no matter what anyone says, we love bullies. As long as they're bulling someone else, most of us want to do exactly that: call the shots, name the tune, dictate the terms.

Except in a free, or more or less free, market everyone with a checkbook gets to be a bully. Apple doesn't have a SWAT team running along forcing consumers to buy unFlashed iPhones and iPads at gunpoint. Around 84 million people did that all on their own, bullying Research in Motion, Microsoft, Adobe and a lot of other big companies in the process.

Apple will change it's stance on Adobe Flash when 84 million customers dump their iPhones at the front door of the company's Cupertino headquarters. Figuratively speaking.

Then J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D., Principal Analyst with MobileTrax also heard the call to Peacemaker. He was motivated by something near and dear to him and his wife Alicia: country music. They settled down together on the Purdy family couch to watch the recent Academy of Country Music Awards. Imagine their dismay, their palpable disappointment, their desolation when they...well, here's Gerry's own moving description of this crisis.

"When I got the iPad, I opened up the Safari browser and went to the show’s web site and then selected the voting link. Wham! Just like that the entire process came to a halt. A big message came up on the screen: “Need to install Adobe Flash.” We were dead in the water. We couldn’t vote because Apple and Adobe are at odds over the use of Flash on Apple’s mobile devices."

Wham.

That's not just wrong. It's Plain Wrong. As Purdy explains: "When there’s something as popular as a nationwide TV show with tens of millions of people watching and Apple declares that Flash can’t run on the iPad, it’s just plain wrong."

But you can't keep a good analyst down. Purdy realized that the solution to not being able to vote online in the Country Music Awards is "The Flash Peace Summit."

"When major disagreements happen in the world, the best thing to do is to get the parties together, sit down and calmly workout an acceptable resolution....The focus of a Peace Summit is to create solutions instead of continuing with hostilities." As they say, if it was easy, anybody could do it.

There's a slight problem when Purdy invokes the "peace process" in the Mid-East as an example. "In the Mid-East," he assures us, "warring parties have held a number of formal summits that have opened up dialogue and reduced tensions." I'm not sure what planet his iPad is on, but the last time "tensions" -- such a soothing word to describe rockets crashing into apartment complexes and human bombs exploding themselves in shopping malls - were "reduced" in the Mid-East was, oh, probably about 587 BC when Nebuchadnezzar ended an 18-month war by breaking through the walls of Jerusalem, sacking the city, and deporting thousands of potential future troublemakers back to Babylon. Unless Purdy meant the Mid-East of the United States.

Where the InfoWorld peace plan focuses on the technical origins and fixes to The Problem, the Purdy peace plan focuses on process: Apple and Adobe can send up to 10 people each, plus their respective CEO's. Another 10 "technology experts" would be present "to offer their recommendations on how best to solve the problem." He recommends John Murrel, San Jose Mercury News tech blogger http://blogs.siliconvalley.com/gmsv/ as the sucker who'd MC this technotheater. We're up to 33 people, minimum, already.

After a morning of presentations and the experts' recommendations, "...over lunch, Apple and Adobe would comment on what they would need changed in the recommended solution in order to support the recommendation by the panel of experts." A little more give and take and presto: "An agreement would then be put together by the technology panel of experts, and final concurrence reached in the afternoon." QED.

"To my friends at Apple and Adobe: Make us all proud that disagreements like this can be resolved without outside intervention," Purdy concludes.

What the heck is wrong with outside intervention? That's what a market economy is. Company's propose and markets dispose, because everyone with a dollar, or a couple of hundred of them anyway, gets a vote and a voice.

And guess what? InfoWorld readers agree, as shown by the results of InfoWorld's own poll, which asks, "How should the Flash-on-iPhone issue be resolved?" Nearly half selected "Apple has every right to block Flash." And just over a third chose the standard, millenial generation cop-out response "Apple should let users choose to run Flash or not." Just 17%, all of whom should be forced to watch "Independence Day" three times, selected "Apple and Adobe should pursue InfoWorld's peace plan 17%."

I hope Steve Jobs and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan keep sniping, snarking, arguing, yelling, pounding the tables, pounding their chests, turning apoplectic with rage. I hope they call each other out and settle this like Captains of Industry, in the marketplace. Let there be blood.