Adobe: Apple Blocking Flash For Corporate Gain
When it was noticed that the iPad was without Flash, Apple was quick to point out that it’s buggy and slow. Rumors also circulated that Steve Jobs was taking up some noble cause to bring down Flash’s dominance on the web and popularize HTML5. A manager from Adobe is now stating that Apple is blocking Flash for one reason – profit.
Adobe Product Manager Adrian Ludwig went on the offensive at biconews.com as he defended his company’s product against Apple’s claims. His first point is that Flash has been running on mobile phones for some time now, with none of those models featuring a loss in stability or battery life.
Ludwig says that Apple has blocked Flash on the iPhone and iPad for their own profit. As he puts it, if users could go to Hulu to watch recent TV shows, they wouldn’t need to purchase them from iTunes.
Likewise, Ludwig says that Flash games and applications hosted on the web would lure people away from the paid apps on the iPhone and iPad – of which, Apple takes 30%. Ludwig pointed out that other scripting languages, Java, Ruby, .Net and Python are also blocked on the iPhone OS, and from his point of view, it’s all about protecting Apple’s profits.
It wouldn’t be the first time that the Jobs administration at Apple has done something like this. After all, he did kill the Apple Clone program – and originally the iPod Shuffle only worked with the Apple-branded headphones. And Apple’s draconian and secretive iTunes App Store approval process is hardly open.
With the upcoming HTML5, Adobe’s Flash does seem to be in dire straights, but Mr. Ludwig does make some valid points. Which side – Apple or Adobe – is telling the truth on the real reason for the iPhone OS’s lack of Flash support? We’ll let you decide, but the truth is likely somewhere in the middle.
Corporate Gain and Human Loss
Perhaps it's the approach of the millennium, a good time for taking inventory. Or the cold war's end, the stock market's heat, the celebrity of mega-magnates. Whatever the reason, business tales -- business details, even -- are increasingly the stuff of fiction.
My own list includes two novels from last year: "The Ax," Donald E. Westlake's chilling mystery about layoffs in the paper pulp industry, and "American Pastoral," Philip Roth's sweeping, Pulitzer Prize-winning family narrative shaped in part by a compelling chronicle of its fictional family's business: glove making.
Then there are this year's satirical novels: "God Is My Broker," by Christopher Buckley and John Tierney, a send-up of the advice-mongers of money and management, and "Lloyd: What Happened," by Stanley Bing, a comedic business novel related in prose and, with a deadpan nod to executive readers, in four-color charts.
Now "Gain," by Richard Powers, takes the corporate tale beyond suspense, satire or subplot.
This is a big, serious novel of business. Viewed through the prism of the fictional Clare Soap and Chemical Company and its company town, "Gain" is a saga about the romance and ruin created by American enterprise.
The novel tells two tales simultaneously -- the history of Clare, a conglomerate of consumer, agricultural and chemical products that began as a family candle-and-soap "manufactory" in the early 19th century, and the story of Laura Bodey, who lives in the present in Lacewood, Ill., Clare's longtime headquarters.
Bodey's life -- she is the mother of two -- is dominated by disease. Her daughter is grieving for her best friend, who has succumbed to a malignant brain tumor. And Bodey herself has just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Bad luck all around, she thinks, initially shrugging off an Environmental Protection Agency study of toxic emissions at Clare.
The parallel stories, of company and citizen, keep alternating. Although the two narratives never exactly meet, the intended link is clear from the novel's start: With corporate gain comes personal loss. Robust growth exacts a price. Period.
Yet this overarching message -- reinforced by the author's use of reprints of fictional advertising for Clare products -- never overwhelms the narrative. In the capable hands of Mr. Powers, whose most recent book, "Galatea 2.2," is a futuristic Pygmalion story, "Gain" is still very much a novel. It's just that it remains a novel in two parts.
The book is at its best when spinning its textured corporate history. Against a rich American backdrop, the Clare company takes shape vividly, as real as the real-life companies mentioned along the way: DuPont, Lever Brothers and Procter & Gamble.
As the three Clare brothers (and the reader) conquer the mysteries of saponification -- the process of turning grimy grease into soap -- and as Clare expands its product base, "Gain" holds up a mirror to corporate life in the 19th and 20th centuries.
These segments are dense with American history. In fine, old-fashioned prose, the author places the Clare brothers -- Samuel, Benjamin and Resolve -- in a firm social context. And he guides the growing company through patent scuffles, financial panics, incorporation issues, union organizing and, finally, environmentalism.
The brothers are not portrayed as greedy. They are honest suppliers, pay decent wages, and, if the company pollutes, it's out of ignorance or accepted practice. The beast of growth, the corporate behemoth, must be fed. So the brothers feed it.
"Gain" is less persuasive in the Lacewood sections, where the writing style is ultramodern -- present-tense prose sprinkled with brand names and wisecracking dialogue. We care about the main characters, but the story is static.
When we meet her, Laura Bodey has a good sense of humor, two teen-agers, a married lover, a real estate job and cancer. Aside from her disease, little else progresses. Her fatalistic attitude about her illness is altered only minimally when she learns about fellow cancer sufferers and their lawsuit against Clare.
Like others in her town, she is alienated from the history that created her community. When her enlightenment comes, it takes the form of blanket commercial hostility (she calls a business telemarketer "evil") or naïve questioning about the safety of her hair dye, diet soda or dandruff shampoo.
Only the passages about her course of chemotherapy -- finely observed and affecting -- live up to the writing in the book's "other" novel.
Mr. Powers pulls plenty of threads to try to bring together these parallel stories. But the twin narratives never cross convincingly, despite the novel's strong writing and wonderfully illuminating detail. There's no climax, no meaningful moment when the two main characters -- corporation and citizen -- confront each other.
Of course, given its premise, "Gain" can't really deliver such a denouement. In this novel, it is corporate growth itself -- not greed, corruption or any other human foible -- that is the villain. Clare's crimes, you might say, are nothing personal.