We’ve all heard the stories about how Toyota is having problems with everything right now, and have even paused production of many of their top-selling models while they sort out the problem (and presumably so they don’t have to go back and fix a load of cars they just built, as well as not producing a load of cars that nobody will buy because of perceived problems).

But in a recent article, The Register (UK IT News with a light-hearted slant, and one of my favourite sites) were reporting on the latest ‘news’ from the world of Adobe, about a serious security flaw in the Adobe Download Manager. They made the comment that this problem and others in recent times “have made Adobe the Toyota of the software industry”.

Initially, this made me laugh, but only because it is so true!

Some of their software (in this case Flash player) is so poorly written that Apple have publicly stated that it’s not going near the iPhone or iPad.

Adobe themselves have said that when Windows Phone 7 (the new Windows Mobile – which looks very interesting) is released at the end of this year, there will not be a Flash player for it. To me, that’s another nail in the coffin for Flash, because the longer people have to live life without it, the more they will realise that they can live without it – and if it IS buggy and chews the life out of their mobile devices’ batteries, they will be happy to continue to live without it even after it is released.

As a software engineer of many years now, when I see a company such as Adobe saying that they cannot produce a version of the player they refer to as ‘ubiquitous’, for a new platform that has been announced now and will be available more than six months from now – that says to me one of two things: Either the code base for said player stinks to high heaven, and even small tweaks involve refactoring thousands of lines of rancid code, or their software team has no idea how it works and daren’t commit to having a working version half a year from now. Remember that the whole Flash ‘platform’ was bought wholesale from Macromedia a few years back – did they not audit their source code before buying it?

Adobe used to have a reputation for excellent software. Remember Postscript? Photoshop? Premiere? All groundbreaking in their day.

Once Toyota have sorted out their problems, their brand will have been damaged and the jokes will continue for a while – but I expect them to bounce back, since they have always had a reputation for quality and reliability.

Adobe? Not so sure.

There is a debate going on at the moment about Flash. This is a debate that has only really started heating up since Apple announced the iPad and stated that neither it nor the iPhone (and iPod Touch) would be running Flash any time soon.

Adobe countered this very public dismissal of their software by saying that Apple would be denying users of the iPhone/iPad the ability to view ‘most of’ the internet.

I can understand why Adobe would be put out by Apple’s refusal to support their technology, on the back of which they sell their own products, and I can also understand why Apple does not want to support Flash on the iPhone OS (for want of a better name – what else should we call it, MacOS Mobile?).

There are a few things to note about this disagreement:

• Apple has publicly stated that Flash is the only commonly-used (de facto) standard on the web that is entirely proprietary. Flash binaries can only be played by software written by Adobe.
• Adobe has produced a Flash plugin that runs on Apple’s desktop OS for many years. Its performance has always been sluggish when compared to its Windows counterpart.
• Everyone is focusing on the Video aspect of Flash, with hardly a mention of the Flash games that are the mainstay of Facebook and its ilk, and the moving (and sometimes LOUD) ads that are the bane of any user of the internet.
• Whichever aspect of Flash we talk about, it has to be mentioned that the Flash plugin on MacOS crashes. A lot. According to sources within Apple, it is the number one cause of software crashes reported by users.
• The Flash plugin on MacOS is a resource hog. It uses a LOT of CPU, even when just showing static images.

Put all these facts together, and you come up with a ‘standard’ that Apple’s users can only use with a plugin that is written by Adobe, and is buggy and slow. And Adobe has had a long time to fix it.

Adobe’s take on this is that Apple has not given them access to low-level APIs that would allow them to make video faster.

That’s it?

Adobe release a slow, buggy resource-hog of a plugin whose purpose is to play Flash files and Flash video, and say that the reason that it’s so slow is that Apple don’t allow them access to private APIs that would make video faster.

I don’t buy it.

If we were just talking about video playback (for which alternatives are starting to emerge – HTML5′s video tag is now supported by several browsers, on MacOS and Windows, although it’s not yet quite ready), then I would concede that it could have an effect on the performance.

But they are completely sidestepping the issue of the plugin’s tendency to crash and its propensity for CPU-munching. Battery life on a MacBook Pro can be as much as halved, just by reading a web page that has a single Flash ad at the top. Open the page, and fans come on. It’s not pretty.

Steve Jobs calls Adobe ‘lazy’ for their attitude towards Flash on MacOS, and since it has existed for so long you would have to agree with him. Although to be fair to Adobe, they only bought the technology a few years ago.

A few years. And it’s still a buggy resource hog.

Yeah, lazy could be a fair assessment.