



Apple's CEO leaves no stone unturned in a candid interview













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RE: Get over it already.
By XSpeedracerX on 6/2/2010 3:54:48 PM , Rating: 5
And the phonograph record was the media of choice for over 100 years. Don't see much of those any more, do you? Or how about Beta and VHS tapes, or HD-DVD? No? Even the DVD is going to be replaced by Blu-Ray or... Things change.

None of those examples apply to flash vs. HTML5 because in each of the those cases, the established format had clear and distinct disadvantages when conpared to the newcomer that made the initially costly switch over from one format to another beneficial to consumers and producers alike. What does HTML5 have over flash to justify converting ones entire catalog of media?

For example, Youtube's database size might be 45TB and all of it is in flash. All of it. Some of it uses the h.264 codec, but this to is only accessible from a flash interface (there you go if you're wondering how apple can have a youtube app). Converting all of that video to HTML5 might be a 20 million dollar investment of time, energy, coding (because the web page used to show the videos will have to be retrofired to support this) and college educated manpower. What does HTML5 offer over flash to both consumer and producer to justify this investment?

Flash is a bloated, proprietary dinosaur.

So? What about that make it unviable or unprofitable? The same could be said of any incarnation of windows past-present and future, yet it enjoys 98% market share and heres a fact; No matter what radical changes Personal Computing undergoes its a guarantee that your great grandkids will be using windows. probably to surf youtube for some cool vids. With the latest flash plugin of course.

Flash is unfriendly to search engines because there is no text to search if the information is embedded in the Flash content.

LOL if you think that's actually a detriment to flash. Producers of proprietary premium content DON'T WANT you to be able to easily search through their shit from anywhere. Aside from that, this hasn't stopped youtube's own search engine from working just fine.

If Flash is just being used as a container to deliver video, then there are better, open standards alternatives, namely HTML5.

LOL again if you think the world is crying out for open standards. Did wonders for linux to be open. You're average windows box user probably couldn't spell Ubuntu without a web search, let alone tell you what it is or what it does (and your average apple acolyte probably doesn't know that ubuntu and OSX are based on the same Kernel.) Did wonders for openoffice to be, Despite doing the same things as a competitor that costs five hundred dollars while it's 100% free to use forever, it's market share is in the single digits while Microsoft five-hundred-dollar office dominates.

It may be fun to romanticize open standards for everything but, uh...get real. All the stuff we want is proprietary. All the producers want to encode it on a closed proprietary system, so that they can protect/encrypt their shit as much as possible so that they know no one gets in without buying a ticket, and whose heads should roll if the safeguards against piracy fail.

Finally, the thing that all the Flash fan boys seem to miss is, Flash doesn't play well with ANY touch screen. Period.

And what HTML5 fanboi romanticizers seem to forget is NONE OF THAT SHIT MATTERS. None of it. Not even a little. 90% market share means that flash can be old, bloated, not functional and a resource hog, yet giants in the media industry STILL tell Stevie wonder to eat a dick when they are asked to drop support for it, even though that means they are walking away from billions in potential revenue from apple's customers. Why would they do this?

Because they know it's not worth it. It's not worth the time and energy investment required to take a whole catalog of media and move it to HTML5, drop flash, and in the process drop 99% of everyone who watches videos on the internet. It's not even worth it to have a side-by-side HTML5 catalog when 99% of your viewers use flash anyway. I know fantasy land is fun, but it's time to get real.

RE: Get over it already.
By adiposity on 6/2/2010 5:57:57 PM , Rating: 1
wow...just...hammered him.

