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How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM)How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM)Posted Aug 9, 2010 5:39 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048)In reply to: How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM) by Trelane Parent article: How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM) It does only when you take it out of the context that provided the justification. [...]the party with ownership of a key resource may gain the ability to hold up its partner, demanding an unreasonably high price. Flash is a proprietary software development platform and products built on Flash are at risk of hold ups. Permitting flash would provide Adobe valuable leverage against Apple. "We won't give you this feature unless you do X", "We won't release a new version for your platform unless you pay Y", "Highest performance to the phone maker with the highest bid!", etc. Open but still non-apple tools don't present the same problems. Instead we could argue that allowing them would disrupt Apple's ability to "hold-up" their own customers and partners with obvious potentially negative effects on Apple's future income. The article doesn't go into that point since the focus is on on Flash but it can be understood within the same framework.
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How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM) Posted Aug 9, 2010 12:28 UTC (Mon) by Karellen (subscriber, #67644) [Link] "We won't give you this feature unless you do X", "We won't release a new version for your platform unless you pay Y", "Highest performance to the phone maker with the highest bid!", etc.It's not just that. Although Flash is gratis, Adobe is still the only entity allowed to distribute it, or authorize others to do so. Adobe could theoretically pull the current version of Flash player, and no-one would be legally allowed to distribute copies of Flash, either as a download for existing devices, or on new devices, even if the current installer was still "in the wild". And given the lack of alternate implementations, if you had relied on Flash in any way, you'd be completely stuffed with no recourse.
How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM) Posted Aug 9, 2010 20:57 UTC (Mon) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link] Apple "permits" Flash on the Mac, and yet somehow Adobe doesn't seem to have any "valuable leverage against Apple" there. I fail to see how Apple permitting Flash on the iPhone/iPad would give Adobe any leverage either.It's not about leverage, it's about Apple trying to ensure that there is no way for executable content any fancier than can be done in HTML and Javascript to get into the phone without Apple getting a 30% cut. If Apple allowed Flash on the phone, executable content could leak in from other places, rather than just the App Store.
How the Hold Up Problem Explains the Flash Wars (GigaOM) Posted Aug 9, 2010 23:02 UTC (Mon) by gmaxwell (subscriber, #30048) [Link]
I'm interested in knowing how you know that Adobe doesn't have "valuable leverage against Apple" on the Mac desktop.
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