The Angry Drunk

I ran across this arti­cle on TechCrunch by M.G. Seigler regard­ing a recent state­ment made by Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch. Regarding, what else, the iPhone and Apple’s refusal to allow appli­ca­tions built using Flash on the plat­form. Kevin’s full remarks are avail­able here, but here is the part that M.G. focuses on, and that I want to address:

But look at the iPhone heli­copter we just saw — why should I only be able to use an iPhone for that? Why can’t you do that with any phone? If you look at what’s going on now, it’s like rail­roads in the 1800’s. People were using dif­fer­ent gauged rails. Your cars would lit­er­ally not run on those rails. That’s counter to the web. The ‘rails’ now are com­pa­nies forc­ing peo­ple to write for a par­tic­u­lar OS, which has a high cost to switch

M.G. does an ade­quate job of demon­strat­ing why Lynch is wrong by delv­ing into the his­tory of the U.S. rail­road sys­tem and by look­ing at the Japanese model, but he makes the mis­take of accept­ing the metaphor in the first place.

Lynch is craft­ing a metaphor where the devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment used to pro­duce smart — phone

Continue read­ing Adobe’s Messed Up Metaphors