La La land? The valley is going nuts!!

This week has been crazy!

I finally got to read the sacred memo from the special one  (not Mourinho, who's also special, but the really special one :-)) Today! days after it was real-time news :-)

That's cause I was busy at work - yeah ... sometimes work comes before fun things like blogging! Ironically, one of the things that I spent some time on has similar keywords to what became major news this week - Adobe's Creative Suite (one of my products - Site Search - offers an awesome search experience across applications in Adobe's Creative Suite 5 - check it out!)

This week has been crazy! I just said that ...

First, Apple admitted that Macs crash! This must be devastating to all Apple fanboys!

We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash.

News Flash! They blamed it on Adobe.

Then they said a bunch about being "open" - that, by the way, I'll ignore, not because Apple is open (closing out a reasonably popular technology on the web isn't my idea of "open") - but because, personally, I think "open" is overused and overrated. Open does not relate to success, as we've seen over and over in the technology industry. IBM still rakes in billions with proprietary systems (sure, the banks are paying these billions with taxpayer money), Microsoft continues to rule with proprietary systems (offices with windows), and Google's search algorithms are not open-source (pagerank, not openrank). I still don't see Linux beating Windows or OSX.  iPhone and RIM are still pretty strong, tho' Android (the open one) is coming on strong.

Technology succeeds because it is good. Good is better than bad! Open can be irrelevant. Good closed is better than bad open! Let's close that window.

Lots of good points in the commandments. I buy some of them. Not this one, though...

We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Apple decided it did not want to be at the mercy of developer choice. It really isn't at the mercy of a third party, is it? If a "native" iPad app is better than a slow Flash app, users will get the "native" app, no? Let the user decide if he wants to play a crummy game! Why not let the developer decide if something's good or bad? It may be the best way for her to optimize her resources and hit multiple platforms in one shot, instead of being forced to develop more than once. If a developer can write in Java to run on all platforms, maybe they can write in Flash for all platforms (write once, run anywhere). Performance, good or bad ... should we let the developer decide? No! Apple decides.

Amazing that there's so much power here driving an entire industry to shift. I shouldn't be surprised - a president can take a country to war!

iPhone succeeded because the consumer loved it and the developer decided it was worthwhile developing for. Apple will continue to succeed as long as it is building compelling products! They just need to be more compelling than the other ones out there. iPad is a case in point ... compelling!

In the news:
Adobe, trying to Flex it's smaller muscle (remember, an apple a day keeps the doctor away) is offering Android phones to its employees.

Also in this week's news:
Our friends from Redmond also took the opportunity to say that HTML5 was the way to go (too much time and effort spent competing with Adobe with Silverlight? What becomes of Silverlight?)

In other news this week:
Apple's not just shutting down Flash videos globally, it's also stopping the music from playing on Lala :-) What becomes of streaming music? It becomes (for now) iTunes credits, and it stops playing on Google as well?

More news this week from La La land: Yahoo! thinks Google has a problem:

Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search,' said Ms. Bartz. 'It is only half our business; it's 99.9 percent of their business. They've got to find other things to do. Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.

99% vs 50% - is it the size of the pizza, or is it the toppings?

Apple posted. Adobe posted. Microsoft posted. Google posted. And of all people, Yahoo! boasted! This is La La land!