Adobe’s Messed Up Metaphors

May 5th, 2010, by 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 appli­ca­tions is equiv­a­lent to the gauge of the rails that trains run on. This metaphor is utterly wrong. If we are going to com­pare the smart — phone mar­ket to the rail­way sys­tem, then the equiv­a­lent of the rail gauge would be the infra­struc­ture that the phones oper­ate on. It just so hap­pens that that infra­struc­ture is stan­dard­ized. It’s the cel­lu­lar net­works that the phones oper­ate on (sort of, ignore CDMA vs. GSM for the moment) and the Internet that data is deliv­ered to the phones over.

Again, keep­ing to Lynch’s metaphor, the equiv­a­lent of the frame­work used to develop appli­ca­tions for the phones would be some­thing like the man­u­fac­turer of the seats in the rail cars. Apple would rather that it’s rail cars be appointed in fine cus­tom seat­ing, instead of cheap self — assem­bled Ikea chairs. As an iPhone user, I pre­fer the former.

The real issue here, though, isn’t the specifics of Lynch’s argu­ment. It’s the fact that Adobe con­stantly makes these sorts of metaphor­i­cal mis­takes. The sad thing is that they ulti­mately do noth­ing but weaken their argu­ment. Steve Jobs him­self stated exactly what Adobe needs to do to “win” in his let­ter about Flash: demon­strate Flash run­ning excel­lently on an actual ship­ping prod­uct. It won’t change Apple’s mind, but then at least the mar­ket can intel­li­gently decide.

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  • http://mangochut.net/ man­gochut­ney

    Ignoring for a minute my lack of knowl­edge of the rail­road prob­lems in the USA back then; this metaphor works for Apple not against it, when you think about the impli­ca­tions for the web:

    If the rails and cars a com­pany cre­ates (Apple, iPhone OS) is pre­ferred by a large num­ber of cus­tomers, over time a de facto stan­dard is cre­ated.
    Further ignor­ing the neg­a­tive impli­ca­tions of a pos­si­ble mono­pole, let’s not for­get that Apple actu­ally pro­motes the usage of open stan­dards on the inter­net (Apple’s iAds are html5 only!).
    So what Apple is actu­ally doing, is help­ing the web run on pre­vi­ously agreed-upon uni­fied rails.

  • DB

    On top of that, Lynch also com­mits the rather com­mon rhetor­i­cal mis­take (or sleight of hand, if delib­er­ate) of con­flat­ing iPhone apps and the App Store with the Web.

    I’ve noticed that in all the pow­der burned over the “Apple monop­oly!” brouhaha, those rais­ing that cry never seem to fig­ure out that they are oper­at­ing under a fun­da­men­tal mis­con­cep­tion. They’re mired in the old days when the unit of com­pe­ti­tion was the OS and/or hard­ware and indi­vid­ual apps. They haven’t fig­ured out what Apple has — that the real unit of com­pe­ti­tion in the mobile arena is the whole “ecosys­tem”. That nobody else has been able to cob­ble together a com­pet­ing ecosys­tem reflects not on Apple but on those would-be com­peti­tors floundering.

  • DB

    On top of that, Lynch also com­mits the rather com­mon rhetor­i­cal mis­take (or sleight of hand, if delib­er­ate) of con­flat­ing iPhone apps and the App Store with the Web.

    I’ve noticed that in all the pow­der burned over the “Apple monop­oly!” brouhaha, those rais­ing that cry never seem to fig­ure out that they are oper­at­ing under a fun­da­men­tal mis­con­cep­tion. They’re mired in the old days when the unit of com­pe­ti­tion was the OS and/or hard­ware and indi­vid­ual apps. They haven’t fig­ured out what Apple has — that the real unit of com­pe­ti­tion in the mobile arena is the whole “ecosys­tem”. That nobody else has been able to cob­ble together a com­pet­ing ecosys­tem reflects not on Apple but on those would-be com­peti­tors floundering.