Apples actual response to the Flash issue

[Richmond Mathewson]

  On 02/05/2010 20:07, Randall Lee Reetz wrote:
> Adobe didn't conceive postscript, photshop, illustrator, flash, etc.  Mathematica isn't derivative.  Wolfram (for all I rail on his philosophy) is one of the last remaining computer scientists.  I think there is something about the act of writing software the way we've been doing it that either strips the science out of us or keeps the scientists away.  Wolfram is an interesting guy.  His mathematica is like most of this first wave software simply a digital "analog" of a tool we did manually before.  Yet at the same time, he actively promotes the idea of properties and tools unique to computation (his "new" kind of science).  Anyway, this discussion was about steve jobs when I think it should be about adobe's all to familiar entrenchment approach to "innovation".  This, once the disappointment and anger wears off is what has driven steve jobs into such unpopular and dangerous a stance.  Like all tertiary species, runrev can only eat the debris that falls to the ocean floor.  When xtalk was abandoned by apple, that was the day the music really died.
>
Fair point, Randall:  "adobe's all to familiar entrenchment approach to 
"innovation" "; but that is a problem
that tends to happen with ALL successful organisations (including 
Apple); they become complacent and
slack off.

Unfortunately, like it or not, the vast majority of folk use their 
computers as nothing more than
typewriters and video-phones, home entertainment centres and 
mind-numbing devices; and,
despite your ideals, and mine (however much they may differ; and I 
suspect not as much as you might
think); it is again the old problem about who pays for the bread and cheese.
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About 3 hours ago my wife and I went for a walk in a park here in 
Plovdiv; from the hill in the centre of
the park I could see 3 shopping malls under construction: I groaned. My 
wife then pointed out that if
that was what the majority of people wanted then that is what they 
should get. I then pointed that
a society where the 90% of the people are permanently glued to 
'prole-feed' on the telly or the computer,
and for their exercise went to cruise in the malls and mindlessly spend 
money have the vote was not
really the sort of society I wanted to be a part of she agreed, but 
pointed out that there was precious
little we could do about it.
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"When xtalk was abandoned by apple, that was the day the music really 
died. "

All cultures hark back to a semi-mythical golden age, that on closer 
examination turns out to
have been nothing of the sort.

You should have been at the Edinburgh conference (apart from the fact 
that you and I might have been
arrested for savaging each other); there was quite a considerable amount 
of 'music' and the air really was fizzing!
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"Like all tertiary species, runrev can only eat the debris that falls to 
the ocean floor. "

I think that that is being a bit unkind. After all Runrev does work on 
Linux, where (despite your
dislike for Open Source) there is more room for individual initiative 
and movement than in the
relatively tightly controlled worlds of Mac and Windows.