Watching the Apple drop?
Although far less glamorous and nowhere near as adored by the general populace, Adobe has just about as firm a hold on its target market as Apple itself, and it’s a vice-like grip which could well be turned against Apple if the spat goes much further.
The battle over Flash has been brewing since Apple released the original iPhone back in 2007. With no Flash. And four years later, the iPhone OS still has no Flash support built in. More gallingly still, nor does the newly-release iPad. And then we have Steve Jobs dishing out public insults to Adobe on the matter, which doesn’t make things better.
That’s a pretty major blow for a solution who’s whole strength is in its cross-platform nature. And it now has a major platform “black hole” in the crucial form of all mobile Apple devices, which the public do love so much.
However, in this instance, Apple should potentially have been a tad more concerned with another group of people entirely. Developers. And content creators. Both of whom are critical to the continued success of the App Store, and a vital component in why users so appreciate the flexibility of the OS 3-powered products.
Although Adobe hasn’t officially announced anything as yet, heated exchanges have hinted at the one flaw in the Flashless Apple plan. And that’s the Mac, and iMac. These machines are purchased and used, more than any other category, by creative teams. Designers, copywriters, Web design, advertising agencies. All depend heavily on the Adobe Creative Suite for Mac to perform their daily tasks. And with the recent release of Creative Suite 5 (CS5), Adobe is going to become even more the undisputed platform of choice for these professions.
So, what if Adobe did decide that if Apple doesn’t like Flash, it clearly doesn’t like the other elements of CS too much either, and released CS6 as PC-only?
Sure, the explosive (and I don’t mean that dangerously, merely a reflection of sales figures) success of the Apple mobile range is doing wonderful things for the company, but without CS for Mac a huge number of design pros will be forced to move over to a PC instead. And that’s the beauty of a common platform architecture, these users would be comfortably producing arresting work within minutes irrespective of the underlying OS.
It could well cripple the company, losing the sales of Macs to creative professionals the world over.
This would likely be a fair price to pay for arrogance and exploiting your vendor lock-in to its absolute limit. In a world where cross-platform support is getting stronger and stronger, limiting your options to a single vendor doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
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