Move on, nothing to see here - More Apple-Adobe rantage

There's been a lot of talk around the intertubes around Apple and antitrust investigation. You can either view Steve Jobs' open letter/rant as the cause of some reports of antitrust scrutiny, or as their side of the story should there be an investigation.

People talk about a monopoly. From the nascent tablet platform, Apple definitely has a monopoly, but mainly because there are no competitive devices in the market. From a smartphone perspective, depending on what metric you choose to believe, Apple, Blackberry, and Android have some type of stranglehold on the marketplace. And even if a monopoly existed, monopolies are not illegal. Abusing the power of a monopoly is, depending on the action.

Apple and Adobe do not compete in this space. The only tools that are they compete on are their photo imaging tools (iPhoto vs. Photoshop Elements, Aperture vs. Lightroom)...one could make the argument that Adobe's Flash designer tools compete with Apple's XCode IDE, not much of a stretch if Adobe were to make that argument.

This is not about Apple using their dominance in the mobile device platform and their decision to not support Flash to purposely do damage to a competitor. If any of the rumors are true, the Feds would be looking at the iPhone SDK developer agreement that forbids the use of code translators, which would include cross-compilers. Flash is not the issue...it's coincidental that we're talking about the Flash platform but we are talking about the same two combatants in that discussion.

Here's where I see a problem with all this antitrust talk. I feel it's much too early to decide if Apple has a monopoly. Monopolies build over time, not overnight. The iPhone was released 3 years ago and only began to make it's dent in the mobile phone arena within the last year and a half. There are plenty of options and technologies in this space. In fact, with Adobe's decision to focus on bringing Flash to the Android, I would find it difficult to believe that Adobe was at all damaged. Can you say CS5 Update 1 to support Android app generation? Frankly, if what some reports suggest is true, Android can take and keep the extra code bloat that will ultimately result. Why would Apple stake it's name on apps that do not perform well on it's platform? Do you know who would take the heat? Not Adobe...not the developers...but Apple.

Apple *could* have worked with Adobe to iron out the code bloat issues, but given Adobe's track record with developer responsiveness on previous incarnations of Photoshop for Mac, and the poor performance of Flash on OS X, I don't think Apple was holding out much hope for any improvements. On top of that, such assistance could be viewed as Apple endorsing Adobe's cross-platform software. There is no feature advantage for Apple's iPhone OS platform if a tool allowed the developer to compile an app for multiple platforms. Is it wrong for Apple to look out for the consumer and for providing the best possible experience? Would we be talking at all about antitrust if Adobe was not involved and if the Apple still included this provision in the SDK license? Why does Adobe allow it's cross-compiler to produce a 3.6 MB app, when the same app can be 800 kb when using the native XCode tools? To me, it's as though Adobe doesn't care about the crap that they put out. Some of the stuff that's out there in thrill ColdFusion product is still sloppy. Why is it that they still cannot develop a decent IDE that isn't wrapped around one of the worst development environments? It's as though they have no concept of what a polished product should look like or behave.

Here's my hope of what will come out of this: the DOJ or FTC will investigate this, tell Apple they overstepped their bounds, and force Apple and Adobe to come up with a set of tools that doesn't compile a bloated app.

I'm not holding my breath.