Apple, Adobe, Web Analytics and Megalomania

April 15th, 2010

What is it about social media and web analytics which turns CEOs into control freak megalomaniacs anyway?

Last week, it was Apple’s revision of the SDK agreement with developers barring all cross-compilers from use for developing apps heading for the Apple AppStore and which was first pointed out by John Gruber in this post. Most outsiders see this as targeting Adobe’s Flash platform, and it is rumored that Adobe is now contemplating going legal over the issue.

Last September, Adobe purchased web analytics firm Omniture. This was one of the deals where most peoples’ jaws dropped because Adobe’s flagship product is Creative Suite, which is a suite of applications for publishers and creative types.

Omniture’s products are used by business development types, who want to know where visitors are coming from, what sites/search engines refer them, etc. All of this is achieved through the use of tags embedded in each page’s source code. Whenever a request is made to a page, the tag calls a server and logging in that it has been called, including information about the user’s browser, geographic region, etc. With this data, the bizdev types then tell the designers and creatives how to further improve the content and pages, making everybody rich in the process.

Anyhow, that’s the idea.

What made the Omniture acquisition interesting was that in most company organizations, the bizdev and design/creative types don’t work that closely together, let alone use the same production tools. What Adobe proposed through the Omniture purchase was to bring both groups together in its new CS5 product lineup.

But two days before Adobe launches CS5, Apple releases its new guidelines for app development on the iPhone platform, which is aimed at cross compilers, but hits designers using Flash especially hard. For the record, I don’t like Flash myself, it hurts performance, fires up the fan, and is a general nuisance. As far as I’m concerned, real developers use C or a C-derivative language, not Flash.

But banning it!!!??? I believe that apps developed on Flash will probably sell less well in the AppStore, and that the smart Flash developers will say “Hmm, maybe I should start developing using Objective-C and Cocoa frameworks so that I can squeeze that last bit of performance out of OpenGL, etc.” Isn’t wholesale banning a bit much? Why not just let the market deal with the issue?

Now Apple has come out with a new zinger for the new iAd network: developers are not allowed to collect user analytics inside their own applications, while Apple is allowed to insert ads into applications. What does this mean if you are a developer?

  • Apple may insert other ads, even your competitor’s ads into your app, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
  • You cannot collect download and usage data so that you can improve sales of future versions of your app, but Apple can, and they will not share that data with you.

So if you are a smart app developer, what do you do? I’d say that you’d have to put on a business hat, and ask yourself:

  • Do I want broad coverage of a new app to test the waters and see if this app sticks? If so, sell on the App Store.
  • Is my app more narrowly targeted, and has more functionality? Then build a web version of it, and optimize it for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms.

The most important idea behind the platform concept is that it needs to be fair to all players. The AppStore started great, but now it’s showing wear and tear. And that wear and tear is coming from business decisions by Steve Jobs.

Basically, Apple is showing that it wants to be the ultimate ad planner and ad buyer for mobile digital. But good ad planners and buyers don’t compete with their customers. That’s the most basic rule.

Through this action, Steve Jobs is going not only after Adobe’s Flash platform, but it’s Omniture web analytics acquisition too.

Steve, I thought you were a Buddhist? How about taking up golf and getting in touch with your softer side?

Apple Closes The Loop On the Competition

June 11th, 2008


Feature Comparison Chart
  Apple Microsoft Blackberry Nokia Adobe
Rich Internet Applications Dashboard and iPhone Apps Silverlight 2.0 None None Flex/Media Player/Flash Player
Push-sync to Mobile MobileMe/Microsoft Exchange (iPhone only) ActiveSync/Microsoft Exchange (Windows only) For email For email only None
Push-sync to Computer (Corporate) Entourage (Mac only) Microsoft Exchange None None None
Push-sync to Computer (Consumer) MobileMe (Mac and Windows None None None None
Gaming None xBox 360 None nGage II None
Television Apple TV xBox 360 (?) None None Media Player (?)


Just as with a master go player, whose moves seemingly look random in the beginning, Apple’s moves in the mobile and desktop space are beginning to come together.

While the iPhone3G was expected, the real aggressive play came with MobileMe, Apple’s completely revamped version of it’s .Mac subscription service.

With Apple’s announcement of the new iPhone3G and MobileMe web-based push-sync solution, Apple further closed the loop on the competition with a complete soup-to-nuts offering for consumers, and now has a strong entry into the corporate market. By licensing Microsoft Exchange to Apple, the Redmond giant gave Apple an entry path into corporations for the iPhone3G at the expense of Blackberry, and the future of its own Windows Mobile platform.

How will future versions of Windows Mobile differentiate themselves in the corporate marketplace, traditionally Microsoft’s stronghold?

Alvin Foo has excellent coverage of the iPhone3G on his blog, and now also provides a robust development environment for mobile developers.

The feature comparison chart above gives some feel for how things are shaping up for Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Nokia and Adobe. The immediate pressure is on Blackberry, then pressure will shift to Nokia which has a very wide product line, and is the largest seller of mobile handsets in the world.

Apple and Nokia have two different visions of the future: Apple wants to sync multiple devices including computers and mobile phones. Nokia needs to offer single computing platforms in multiple markets which provide excellent computing capabilities with voice capability as their only computer of choice, making it unnecessary to have multiple computers.

Can Nokia pull it off? Unfortunately Nokia is still too married to the voice phone capabilities of its phones, and has not been able to come up with a single data-centric vision of the future for the OS and applications.

Microsoft’s vision of the future is the same as Apple’s: multiple devices with push-sync across platforms. The trouble is that Microsoft cannot have solutions as elegant as Apple’s. The company is reliant on its strong corporate presence to continue to get revenue, but now Apple has a backdoor entry into that marketplace with its licensing of Microsoft Exchange for the iPhone3G. The next step is for developers to come up with iPhone versions of corporate apps for the iPhone. This will give IT departments an opportunity to evaluate the stability and security of OS X.

Microsoft’s matrix management and multiple business units and product lines make it difficult, if not impossible, to come up with single elegant solutions for both corporate and consumer markets. If Microsoft continues to launch operating systems like Vista on a much slower launch schedule than Apple, their position in the marketplace will continue to erode.

In order to pull off a plan as aggressive as Apple’s, you need a strong division management with limited product lines, reporting directly to The Man, Steve Jobs, who has the vision, and gets everybody in line to execute.

Apple’s loop continues to close…