Apple and Microsoft join to fight Opera and Firefox

Very very amusing Mr. godBrick

In a public letter last week Jobs said that Apple would not be including Flash support in the iPhone and iPad because the technology was not "open" enough. He wrote: "Adobe's Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing ... By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system."
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I stand by my opinion that Apple is a bunch of idiots. They won't use Flash's "closed system" system yet they stand behind H.264 which is a "heavily patented and proprietary video codec".

Jobs says that H.264 is a "more modern format" than Flash.
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How does this even make sense? He is comparing two different technologies. Flash can play H.264 content so what is the issue? It is easier to expect people to play H.264 through their Flash plugin (as many people already have the Flash plugin installed) than to expect everybody to upgrade their browsers (and we all know how slow the IE6 upgrade has been/is) so it can be supported natively via HTML5.

Instead of hiding behind bull**** excuses they should just say they are backing their own format as part of a business decision to eliminate possible competition.
 
drukkie said:
And apple is what?
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Jobs is talking about Flash vs HTML5 with h264.
And he is correct.
Trying to bring up off-topic issues as to which of Apples products are open and which aren't is trying to derail the discussion.
 
JStrike said:
Jobs is talking about Flash vs HTML5 with h264.
And he is correct.
Trying to bring up off-topic issues as to which of Apples products are open and which aren't is trying to derail the discussion.
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Well I'm trying to say what Darkstreet said in not so many words :)
 
DarkStreet said:
I stand by my opinion that Apple is a bunch of idiots. They won't use Flash's "closed system" system yet they stand behind H.264 which is a "heavily patented and proprietary video codec".



How does this even make sense? He is comparing two different technologies. Flash can play H.264 content so what is the issue? It is easier to expect people to play H.264 through their Flash plugin (as many people already have the Flash plugin installed) than to expect everybody to upgrade their browsers (and we all know how slow the IE6 upgrade has been/is) so it can be supported natively via HTML5.

Instead of hiding behind bull**** excuses they should just say they are backing their own format as part of a business decision to eliminate possible competition.
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It is hardly "their" format. It is a standard for video encoding. And the patents are administrated by MPEG LA, who's members consist of pretty much every major tech company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
And the patent licence fee if waived for video that is free to end-users
 
JStrike said:
It is hardly "their" format. It is a standard for video encoding. And the patents are administrated by MPEG LA, who's members consist of pretty much every major tech company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
And the patent licence fee if waived for video that is free to end-users
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Semantics. It's obvious I was referring to "their" format as the format they are backing vs the format FF and Opera are backing.

Perhaps Microsoft will get it right this time. They already saw their ass when they backed HD DVD instead of Blue-ray.
 
A little bit of kindling...

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.
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Any threat to the growth of the app store software platform is going to be resisted, vigorously, at this stage. Steve Jobs undoubtedly believes what he (or an assistant) wrote in his thoughts on flash: "Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe's goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps." And he really does not want cross-platform apps that might divert attention and energy away from his application ecosystem. The long term goal is to support the long-term migration of Apple from being a hardware company with a software arm into being a cloud computing company with a hardware subsidiary — almost like Google, if you squint at the Google Nexus One in the right light. The alternative is to join the PC industry in a long death spiral into irrelevance.
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The rest here..
 
rpm said:
The next big evolution of the Internet will be in the realm of video playing. Until now the rapid growth of online video has been built on Adobe's Flash technology.
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Unless you live in SA then the next big evolution is going to be pictures to enhance our current text only experience
 
If the internet then is going to be like it is now (Slow and Sites don't load properly), Then I forsee lots of angry South Africans.
 
kilobitsperyear said:
A little bit of kindling...





The rest here..
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A dodgy article, however it does have some useful truths thrown in.
However, a massively glaring mistake is saying that "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."
Stave jobs cares about controlling the sales channel, as he/apple believes that making/owning the entire widget (Hardware => Software) allows them to create a better experience.

It is important to him as a way to sell more iPods. iPods are not there to sell apps/music.
The iTunes Music Store, the largest music store in the world, makes Apple almost no money. But it helps sell iPods, iPhone and iPads
The App Store makes even less money than the music store. But it helps sell iPods, iPhones and iPads
 
ppedrick said:
Jobs hates Adobe... I think that if you start there and work forward then these decisions become sense.
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Adobe took over Macromedia, their flash always sucked on osx, this an attack on flash/x-macromedia. The Photoshop app is a top app in the appstore and Apple are not killing it.
 
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ppedrick said:
Jobs hates Adobe... I think that if you start there and work forward then these decisions become sense.
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It's not about hate. Flash provides a mechanism to create applications that can be run on an iPhone without needing to go through the App Store. That is his real problem.
 
JStrike said:
A dodgy article, however it does have some useful truths thrown in.
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Heheheh... it IS a bit dodge indeed.

Here is another more on topic read...

And now the codec-war has really begun with both Apple and Microsoft pushing hard for H.264 and trying to mask it with their 'engagement in HTML5' and 'aiming for an Open web', both of which have nothing to do with this, especially not when H.264 comes into play. When Hugo Roy of the Free Software Foundation Europe reminds Steve Jobs of what 'Open' means the response of Steve leaves no question on what it essentially is all about:
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.
So 'Open' in Apple terms just means that the specification of some technology is available to everyone. This contradicts Steve's claim about Adobe's Flash not being 'Open' - Flash is an 'open standard' (by Steve's definition) after all...

But more importantly this response from Steve, combined with the statement from Microsoft in their blog post:
Other codecs often come up in these discussions. The distinction between the availability of source code and the ownership of the intellectual property in that available source code is critical. Today, intellectual property rights for H.264 are broadly available through a well-defined program managed by MPEG LA. The rights to other codecs are often less clear, as has been described in the press. Of course, developers can rely on the H.264 codec and hardware acceleration support of the underlying operating system, like Windows 7, without paying any additional royalty.
paints the whole picture: Apple and Microsoft are after dominance when it comes to video on the web through their mutual contributions to the patent-pool of MPEG-LA that covers the H.264 codec.

Indeed the 'rights to other codecs' may be less clear, but that is something that is (still) not proven yet and may be equally applicable to H.264 itself. Even then it is a question if some applicable patents aren't overly broad, too obvious or with 'prior art' that may invalidate them. All of this has to be determined and will probably take many years.
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i already wrote about this earlier this week.
http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?229380-IE9-to-implement-H.264-in-HTML5&highlight=

it's not really a theora vs h264 issue.
everybody knows that theora is encumbered by potential torpedo patent lawsuits... and the technology is getting a bit old.
google will hopefully be announcing the release of VP8 open source at IO this month.
with their purchase of On2, they bought a whole bunch of patents which they can rebut any potential litigation from mpeg-la licensors.
adobe (who currently uses h264 in flv) will just pick the weaker side, as fragmentation favours their "cross-platform" solution.
google will be looking to roll out VP8 to youtube and their chrome browser.
ff and opera should then get off the hook, and, with adobe joining forces, the battle looks fairly evenly weighted.

the main issue is then having to serve media with two codecs on large lites like hulu, vimeo, youtube etc.

there's a very detailed article and discussion over at ars technica on the issue:
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/04/google-planning-to-open-the-vp8-video-codec.ars
 
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