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
