The Adobe Flash saga: What is Apple really doing?
Dave Winer with some interesting insight into what Apple may really be doing:
I said it's a lot simpler and more insidious. Apple doesn't care about web standards, nor do any other large companies. That term, and "open" are just fig leaves that cover up what they're reallly doing. Instead of opening things up, they're doing just the opposite. Closing as many holes as they can as quickly as they can. Because they're doing what the media business wants to but hasn't been able to do, yet -- control and monetize user programming of content. Apple and many (if not all) of the tech companies want to get the control back from the users. Of course they can't say this, and they won't. But actions speak louder than words.
Winer's take is that Apple is trying to close as many open holes as it can so that it, with the continued blessing of the entertainment industry, can provide a tidy way to monetize digital content moving forward. It's about closing the many paths that are now open and only leaving one road, albeit likely paved with gold, open. It's a curious analysis, one that has baked into it a certain amount of (well placed) tinfoil-hattery.
Winer's opinion runs counter to John Gruber's, who states that Apple is closing the Flash "hole" in the iPhone/iPad platform to 'enforce web standards.' I tend to agree with Gruber, because with Apple, it's all about platform control. The quicker Flash gets relegated to wherever it is that Flash opponents wish it would crawl, the faster, the argument goes, open web standards like HTML5 and h.264 can become mainstream.
It will be very interesting to see what's in the middle of all of this, where the truth often lies.
