Apple Ban Hurts Microsoft, Or Does It?

This week, Adobe basically threw in the towel on the idea of developing for the iPhone/iPad platform, due to Apple's developer tool restrictions. Although Adobe is certainly the biggest and most direct loser in Apple's latest grab for complete platform control, they're not the only casualty.One of the biggest potential losers is Microsoft, which had hoped to compete with Flash through Silverlight. (Yet the site for Microsoft's new Kin Phone uses Flash, what's up with that?) A few years back, CEO Steve Ballmer said the company had no interest in blessing the iPhone with Silverlight anyway. Of course, that was before the iPhone took an even more dominant position in the market and Microsoft's own mobile OS crumbled. If Silverlight is going to be successful on mobile platforms it pretty much has to go through iPhone. But now it can't.

Microsoft can do the same as Apple and dictate that Silverlight is the only way to develop on Windows Phone 7. Unfortunately for them, that strategy only works effectively if you're the market leader, and on mobile platforms Microsoft is trailing the pack. It doesn't make a lot of sense to close your platform before it ships, and before most developers have even written their first line of code for it. No, Steve Jobs is doing it right; it's better to act as if everything will be open and happy until the product is successful, then whack them after they're locked in.

All of this drama is making Google's Android platform look a whole lot better. Both Silverlight and Flash would be welcome there, but the question is whether they are ready for mobile applications. As AppleInsider points out, it's not as if Adobe is completely ready for mobile platforms. Yet that's not the point; the question is whether mobile platform makers are going to dictate the tools their developers use, rather than letting developers decide which tools will deliver the apps that users want. Flash and Silverlight should be able to stand or fall on their own.

Although the emerging HTML5 standard could make browsers and browser technology another winner in this conflict, I don't think they're the complete answer. Writing a good mobile app means paying attention to how much of the device the app uses and how often it runs. It's not clear right now that HTML5 "web pages" will have the control they need to avoid draining the battery in 30 minutes, nor may they have enough access to all the features of the device without cumbersome security dialogs. A lot of that depends on whether the keepers of the platform deign to allow it, and Apple has already shown that it isn't willing to yield much control.