Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself
In 1996 when Apple was seemingly on the ropes, Adobe made a crucial business decision and one that is coming back to bite them in the ass. They declared that their primary development platform would be Windows; subsequently, every new application …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands mid-fight. Two days earlier, an Adobe developer's post on the new iPhone 4.0 SDK restrictions framed Apple's cross-compiler ban as a slap at developers, and syndicated pickups the same day — BoomTown's interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch defending against 'protectionist' charges, Fortune asking whether Steve Jobs has gone mad — show how fast the dispute traveled beyond the blogosphere.
The author's angle is historical rather than reactive: Adobe's confirmed 1996 declaration of Windows as its primary development platform, made when Apple looked finished, meant its flagship tools and Flash runtime were built for someone else's ecosystem first. That framing echoes January's contrarian argument that the best way to save Flash was to kill it — both treat Flash as strategically exposed, not just blocked.
First-order effects
- Adobe's route from Flash to native iPhone apps is closed by the new SDK language, so shops that built on Flash tooling must either rewrite in Apple's native frameworks or abandon iOS distribution.
Second-order effects
- Developers facing the choice will weight future projects toward native iOS skills, eroding Flash's value as a write-once runtime, while rival smartphone vendors gain an opening to court Adobe as an ally against Apple's terms.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners keep dictating which tools may target their app stores, cross-platform runtimes give way to native SDKs as the default, and tooling vendors' fortunes hinge on the goodwill of a handful of gatekeepers.
The trend: Mobile platform owners are tightening control over developer toolchains, shifting leverage away from cross-platform runtimes like Flash and toward whoever controls the distribution layer.