tequila bomb

Yet another move to end dependence on Flash, giant online video website, Vimeo, today introduces a new universal video player designed to work on the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch (iOS) and Android devices.

“With the latest generation of browsers and devices, we’ve had huge demand for an embeddable player that works with HTML5 and on devices like iPad and iPhone,” said Andrew Pile, vice president of product and development for Vimeo, in a statement.

In other news Adobe’s CEO, talking with the London Telegraph, said that his company would “..rather work with partners who are interested in working with us.”

Translation : The FTC probe thing didn’t come off. And we still have not delivered any of the software we promised.

Among other things, this has to make it worth the download…

Safari Reader

Safari Reader removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article — whether two or twenty. Onscreen controls let you email, print, and zoom. Change the size of the text, and Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader.

Once again, Apple may be skating not to where the puck is, but where it’s going to be.

Exactly.

President Jeff Malkin sent me the chart above, which he believes is representative of the Web in general, including mobile. As the chart shows, in the past four quarters, the H.264 format went from 31 percent of all videos to 66 percent, and is now the largest format by far. Meanwhile, Flash is represented by Flash VP6 and FLV, which combined represent only 26 percent of all videos. That is down from a combined total of 69 percent four quarters ago. So the native Flash codecs and H.264 have completely flipped in terms of market share (Flash also supports H.264, however, but you don’t need a Flash player to watch H.264 videos).

It’s already over for Flash.

[As Steve Jobs already explained], Apple products like the iPhone and iPad don’t support Flash because although 75 percent of video on the Web is in Flash ” almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.” The next day, Microsoft weighed in, saying that Internet Explorer 9 would only support the H.264 codec for HTML video.

Another data point that Steve Jobs mentions: All YouTube videos are available in H.264, which alone represents 40 percent of all videos on the Web.

TechCrunch also quote an informative paragraph on what all the different codec and format names mean :

The formats can be confusing between containers and codecs. FLV is the Flash container with the old H.263 codec. Flash VP6 is the Flash container with the VP6 codec. H.264 is a codec that is utilized in a number of different containers (.FLV, .MP4, .MOV) and on Apple mobile devices and when deployed by browsers for HTML5. Microsoft just announced that IE will use H.264 as the default codec for HTML5. And, Google will be soon offering the VP8 codec as open source which will add another formidable flag in the format wars.

Finally from Hugo Roy’s blog an interesting email from Steve Jobs (in answer to Hugo’s Open Letter to him) on why Apple chose the H.264 standard for Safari’s HTML5 video over Ogg Theora, which Firefox and Opera support in their HTML5 video implementations (Google’s Chrome supports both).  Ogg Theora is royalty free while H.264 requires licensing which could come at a price.  Wikipedia also uses Ogg Theora.

From: Steve Jobs
To: Hugo Roy
Subject: Re:Open letter to Steve Jobs: Thoughts on Flash
Date 30/04/2010 15:21:17

All video codecs are covered by patents. A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source.

Sent from my iPad

First let me clarify the title. In my opinion Steve Jobs is pretty much spot on with his assessment of Flash in his recent open letter on the subject. The Adobe CEO responded to that letter in a somewhat lacklustre way in an interview with the WSJ.

Most hilariously (and disingenuously) spouting these priceless sound-bytes :

Mr. Narayen called accusations about Flash draining battery power “patently false.”

Mr. Narayen also said that if Adobe crashes on Apple, then that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system.”

And finally on Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is a closed platform, Mr. Narayen chuckled and said. “I find it amusing, honestly. Flash is an open specification.”

Meanwhile digits, with even more insanity, tried to sum up the whole issue in a 5 minute “news” piece which reminded me a little of a The Simpsons cartoon. An episode with them cast in the role of Bart re-scripting entirely what Jobs had really said. Interestingly most of the presenters do physically resemble Simpsons characters. Seriously, watch the clip.

Since then various other people have chimed in with their 2 cents on the subject… Some with something worthwhile to contribute, and others seemingly either trying to stir the pot, or simply become relevant by association.

In the first group are some engineers who used to work at Adobe :

Wired tells us that back when the iPhone was introduced in 2007, Adobe failed to take the Apple product seriously.

Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh, former Adobe mobile engineers, said they were raising flags at Adobe in 2007 about the same complaints that Jobs detailed Thursday.

They said they left Adobe because executives did not take the iPhone seriously when Apple announced the touchscreen device in 2007. Instead, Adobe focused on feature phones (cellphones with lightweight web features, not smartphones) and invested in development of Flash Lite to play Flash videos on such devices. Subsequently, Adobe shut down the mobile business unit in 2007, and has suffered from a brain drain in the mobility space ever since, Icaza and Luh said.

This is similar to the mistake Adobe made when they publicly discarded the Mac for the PC, as I mentioned in another piece here. The Wired piece continues…

Adobe’s 2007 decision to focus on Flash Lite and feature phones instead of iPhone compatibility is the reason Adobe is behind and still has not offered a fine-tuned version of Flash for any smartphone, including the iPhone or any Android device, Icaza and Luh said.

The pair echoed many of the same concerns expressed by the Apple CEO.

“Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS,” Luh said. “It wasn’t designed with that in mind at all.”

In the second group are the likes of Dan Rayburn, who clearly has an agenda of his own. So I won’t link to him. I’ll just quote his idiocy instead. He responds to Steve’s assertion that “Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice” like this…

Well I hate to tell you this Steve, but it’s still the PC era. For all the growth of the mobile space in the U.S., how much of that content consumed on a mobile device is video? Very little. No one is getting rid of their PCs because they have a mobile device, the PC is not going anywhere and the volume of content that is delivered to PCs will always surpass what will be delivered to mobile. Apple’s iPhone and iPads are not going to replace the PC experience, ever.

I was surpised that he did not use evah for the final word in that paragraph, or perhaps tack on something along the lines of APPLE R TEH SUXORZ or similar tomfoolery to round it all off.

Dan also points out that many videos on the web are still not viewable for devices that don’t use Flash. But clearly misses the point of it all. The point being that we are in a transition. One in which he is firmly on the side of the luddites.

Even Microsoft recognise that Flash is not the way forward :

The future of the web is HTML5.
In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.
Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based.
Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

From IEBlog.

Today. Not tomorrow.

Microsoft is the same company that killed not one, but two Tablet projects this week by the way. I’ll come back to that.

Admittedly Microsoft are dumb. But they are not quite as dumb (or myopic) as Mr.Rayburn.

Sure, the battle lines are drawn in this war. But to what end? The outcome is clearly a forgone conclusion for Flash. What we should really be focussing on is the real subject matter at hand…

Back to some more of those people in the first group.

Charlie Stross has this to say :

Steve Jobs believes he’s gambling Apple’s future — the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn — on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here’s why …

It’s worth referring back to my comment a couple of paragraphs up now. Microsoft very publicly tried to trump Apple’s iPad launch with their own announcement of a Windows 7 Tablet from HP, at CES. This is the same Tablet that HP have now scrapped since buying Palm. And yesterday Microsoft confirmed that their other (incredibly innovative) tablet product called Courier, is not real, and won’t ever be made.

Microsoft really are really dumb. Did I say that already?

Anyway, here’s Steve Jobs’ strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die.

PCs are becoming commodity items.

It’s a long running joke in my drinking circles that one day we will indeed see a PC in a box of cornflakes.

Apple has so far survived this collapse in profitability by aiming at the premium end of the market — if they were an auto manufacturer, they’d be Mercedes, BMW, Porsche and Jaguar rolled into one.

And I think they will continue to be able to do just that moving forward. This is where Charlie’s and my viewpoints diverge though…

The App Store and the iTunes Store have taught Steve Jobs that ownership of the sales channel is vital. Even if he’s reduced to giving the machines away, as long as he can charge rent for access to data (or apps) he’s got a business model.

In many ways this has been Sony’s and Microsoft’s business model for some time with consoles, and that of other console / handheld manufacturers in the past. The software is where they make their money. I do think that Steve wants to monetize as many revenue streams as he can. But I don’t see Apple prioritising software, or media, over hardware as a revenue stream in the foreseeable future.

This year, for the first time, the Apple Design Awards at WWDC’10 are only open to iPhone and iPad apps. Mac apps need not apply; they don’t contribute to Apple’s new walled garden ecosystem.

Sure, Apple is prioritising mobile devices over traditional computers. But that is because that is where the market, the future market, the profitable, sustainable market is going… for hardware. What Apple want to do is provide the whole experience, with a cohesive package of must-have Hardware, User Experience and Content.

Apple are trying desperately to force the growth of a new ecosystem — one that rivals the 26-year-old Macintosh environment — to maturity in five years flat.

I don’t think they are trying desperately. But I do think this is their number one aim. So does John Siracusa at Ars. And he gets the reason right, in my opinion, with this bit :

Like the Mac, the iPhone debuted with a huge technical lead over its competitors. But this time, Apple is determined not to squander its advantage. Instead, it’s front-running as hard as it possibly can. Anything that has any chance of slowing down “the progress of the platform” has simply got to go. And the best way Apple knows to ensure platform progress is by controlling its own destiny in every way that it can. That means, among other things, no middleware vendors, no encouragement of cross-platform development (either explicit or implicit), and complete, arbitrary control over every application’s presence on the platform.

Apple has learned from the past. If they saw a future with Flash they’d simply constrain it in a way that suited their current business model, rather than kill it. But for them it’s a millstone they don’t want to have around their neck in this race.

The past is the Mac vs the PC, Flash, or being tied to any kind of middleware or any silicon company that will constrain your product development path.

I raise a glass of 10 year old Tequila to 9To5Mac for many of the sources in this piece.