View From the Phlipside – Apple vs Flash

My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media.  TV, Radio, the movies and more.  I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion.  Call this The View From the Phlipside.

When Steve Jobs, the visionary leader of Apple, speaks lots of people listen.  Some listen in trembling adoration much the way a labrador retriever looks at its master.  Others listen with a profound sense of cynicism about what vision Jobs is planning on foisting on the world this time around.  Some of us just know that he’s usually good for something interesting.  But what do you do when he opens his mouth and something ridiculous falls out?  Like justifying not using Flash on the new iPad because it’s, his words now, a “dying technology”.

You mean the dying technology that accounts for nearly 3 out of every 4 videos currently showing on the internet?  The technology that is getting some massive investments by major media companies all over the world.  THAT dying technology?  The reality is Steve Jobs hates the folks at Adobe who are the folks behind the Flash technology.  And Steve takes his professional hatreds VERY seriously.  That’s why you can’t use Flash on the iPad, or the iPhone for example.  As an iPhone user I can tell you that Steve’s personal vendetta is really annoying.  I don’t watch a lot of video on my phone (the screen is too small in my opinion) but it would be nice to have some access to the vast majority of what’s out there.  But my wants and needs are small potatoes when Steve gets a bug up his nose.  I think we can rely on his competitors trying to appeal to people like me.
 
A large part of the Apply mystique has to do with that whole visionary thing.  So saying things that are just patently silly doesn’t help.  When they are so obviously self serving it doesn’t help either.  What does Steve think we should be using instead?  That would be something called H.264.  What’s that?  Why that’s the very expensive piece of software that Steve Jobs and Apple is trying to sell.  With things like the Newton, the Apple Lisa and the ROKR phone lurking in Apple’s history Steve needs to pick his visions with a little more care.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.

“The View From the Phlipside” airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright – Jay Phillippi 2010