MobileMe, iPhone, and Apple’s Battle for the Web

By Kyle Baxter

The future of the web is within reach. The web is now primarily two things: a new platform for applications, and a means for distributing and consuming media.

Currently, due to the open standards which power the web, no one company or group controls it in any real sense. Google may dominate search and advertising and Microsoft may dominate the browser market, but neither company has any absolute control. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer market share has steadily declined as other convincing browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, have become available. Real control comes in owning the technology which powers the web.

Online video, though, largely because of YouTube’s success, is now mostly delivered in Flash format. Adobe Flash has become a de facto standard for online video, and is now being pushed as a web application platform in and of itself.

Recognizing the threat this poses, Microsoft has responded in its usual fashion — it has released its own proprietary platform, Silverlight, to compete with Adobe’s Flash.

Apple is in the opening moves of its own response, but perhaps surprising to some, Apple’s response is based on open standards. Apple, which is viewed as closed and loathe to use the work of others, has become open web and video standards’ greatest evangelist. Apple’s battle is not to control the web, but rather to keep it open.

The Post-PC, and the Web

This all seems rather esoteric, and so it is worth discussing why any of this matters. The web is becoming an application platform. More than anything else, people now use the web for Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google Documents, and other applications. These applications are based on, mostly, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and XML, all open standards. Because of the relative maturity of these standards, their ease of entry (all are free to use and develop with, and are relatively simple to learn), and the platforms that have developed around them, the quantity and quality of these applications has become rather impressive.

Even more interesting, though, is the openness that these applications have engendered. Most have an API which allows other websites, web applications, or desktop applications to tap in to their own web application. For example, I can integrate Flickr and Twitter with my own weblog without much difficulty, or more powerfully, I can combine Google Maps with location-based data and create something of more value than the two by themselves.

There is a rich future in relatively-easy to develop, and relatively-open web applications, which connect different data and people together.

Part of this is technological, and another part is philosophical. XML is an excellent language for sharing data, but the second part is the most important: open standards encourages openness. Application APIs, OpenID and other developments are not surprising when you consider the languages used to build them — they are predisposed to openness, and that is a really, really good thing.™

Moreover, the move toward web applications will accelerate soon as mobile computing devices like the iPhone become more prevalent. These devices — the post-PC — are Internet communication devices. They are built to use the web ubiquitously, and that means primarily using web applications and consuming online media. To control the web is to control the future of the computer.

Which is why Adobe is pushing Flash so feverishly, and Microsoft created Silverlight. This is the browser wars all over again, but perhaps with an even greater degree of importance: whoever succeeds this time could control the web.

The Danger of Flash

It is unlikely that even if Adobe or Microsoft succeed in establishing their platform as the web application standard that HTML, CSS and Javascript will disappear completely, but this is also largely irrelevant. Flash has already become the web video standard, and therefore even if Flash does not power a majority of web applications, it will not matter — combining Flash’s domination of video with even mediocre success in web applications would likely cause many HTML, CSS and Javascript developers to switch.

This would give Adobe, which sells desktop applications to develop in Flash, a strong control of the web. They would own web video, and increasingly web applications as well.

The ease of entry for becoming a web developer would be much higher. Developers would more or less need to buy Adobe’s own development tools, whereas with HTML, CSS, and Javascript and related frameworks developers can work in nothing more than a text editor, or choose from a sea of code editors.

Combined with Flash’s hold on video, Adobe would become the web company. All roads would pass through their doors.

Perhaps even worse, though, is the attitude Flash conveys. While open standards encourage openness, Flash’s closed nature could encourage just the opposite. Adobe could control the web and undercut its most innovative uses.

Apple’s Open Strategy

If Apple were only interested in selling hardware, they would be concerned with Flash and Silverlight’s clash with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Apple, however, sells an experience, a combination of hardware and software, and that experience is increasingly becoming dependent on the web. And they sell something else, too: media. Music and video.

Apple’s strategy has two parts, which all converge on the iPhone. First, build a world-class suite of web applications that are as close as anyone has come to a desktop experience, based entirely on HTML, CSS and Javascript. MobileMe serves two purposes: further entrench these open standards as the web application platform, and show that building incredibly powerful applications using them is not a problem, which is a central concern underlying a movement toward Flash.

Second, while Flash has established itself as the video standard on the desktop, there is no real video standard on the mobile device. Apple’s goal is to establish MPEG4, an open audio and video format, as the standard on mobile devices, which are the future.

And this is why these two parts come together with the iPhone. Through the iPhone, Apple is trying to establish MobileMe — HTML, CSS, and Javascript-based web applications — and MPEG4 — open media formats. Web Kit’s incredibly-fast Squirrelfish Javascript engine, which is in Safari 4, will undoubtedly come to the iPhone, and with it, desktop-like experience for web applications. I would then expect HTML, CSS and Javascript-based applications to be allowed to be stored and run locally on the iPhone. ((Which I believe was Apple’s original intention with the iPhone’s widgets, but was ditched because of slow Javascript speeds.))

This also explains quite nicely why Flash is not on the iPhone: not only is it slow and a subpar solution for video, but Apple is keeping the iPhone clean of Flash so open standards can continue to power the web.

That may be hard for some to swallow, but it is undeniably true: Apple’s restrictions on the iPhone are helping to keep the web open.