Friday, April 23, 2010

The Apple Flash battle is similar to the USB and Floppy transition

Just a short note today as an iPhone user.

It is painful that Apple has booted Flash out of their phone, and as a user it causes me to suffer a bit, but I think change has to hurt. This is just Apple's thing. They like to force innovation to happen, which has made a crucial difference in consumer electronics and software over the years.

Intel invented USB, but could not get it implemented in Windows computers. I was very irritated when Apple tossed their PS2 like serial ports on all their machines but... I think it did have the needed effect of accelerating USB adoption.

They did the same thing with the floppy transition, when they dropped the drives from all their stuff. It was a bit painful for a while but thumb drives and writable CDs came along quickly and solved that.

Apple is irritating people with this, BUT it is absolutely having the effect of making HTML 5 a reality just as it did with USB, and the floppy. Even Microsoft has put very good support in IE 9. I don't think this would have happened nearly as quickly without the iPhone thing, and as a web engineer I appreciate the push.

I must keep my iPhone jailbroken thanks to stupid Apple limitations, but on most things I thank Apple for making me suffer for a bit. Without them we might still be using DOS.

2 comments:

aPaladin said...

I think you are missing the point with Flash... Check out http://thefwa.com This is real flash, something that html would not be possible of doing.

Dave Bates said...

That page should not be done with Flash.. What a waste of good index-ability. Flash is not needed for slideshows. Ad supported video is still the real hard bit with html 5. Someone will solve it though...