The iPhone OS 4 SDK licensing agreement has been, well, unpopular.  To anyone who has paid attention to Apple over the past 20 years, it’s certainly not surprising that they want to lock down the ecosystem.  This has been their modus operendi for as long as I can remember.  So while Apple’s “take the ball and go home” strategy certainly generates a roll of the eyes from many, what’s surprising is the indignation that Adobe developer’s have expressed in being locked out of Apple’s poker game.

That indignation seemed to find an ally in Google.  At Google I/O 2010, there was much ballyhoo about open standards and open platforms.  There was direct mention of Flash being an important part of the internet at large, and Adobe fans seemed to have found a Mao for their Ho Chi Minh.  Outside of sharp words, Adobe had very little ammunition in this battle.  Adding Google as a key ally seemed at least to justify their position – even solidify a dynamic place in the marketplace for media delivery.

The politics of this war are less about openness of platform, however.  Apple’s exclusivity practices in the past few decades have been largely about limiting competition and thus maximizing margins from a niche product.  When the product suffered and competition increased in the early 90′s from Microsoft and others, Apple was only able to recover not by changing their strategy but by executing on the fundamentals that allowed this strategy to succeed in the first place – high quality.  Today, Apple has maximized the potential for the platform itself – whether it be a mobile device, laptop, or media center, to sustain it’s own profitability.  But with the computer and handheld market on lengthy cycles between purchases, maximizing revenue opportunity becomes a challenge of ensuring that customers are purchasing Apple product more frequently.  This is where the iTunes Music Store is so critically important to Apple’s strategy.

Flash as a platform is flawed, says Steve Jobs.  His arguments have some merit, particularly on handheld devices.  But once again, this is a proxy argument.  The problem with Flash isn’t that Jobs can’t control the content developed in the platform.  The problem is that by allowing Flash into the Apple ecosystem, Jobs would be opening a wormhole into an alternative media delivery platform.  Flash is a development tool – but by leaps and bounds it’s greatest claim in the frontier of the internet is multimedia content delivery.  YouTube, Brightcove, and Vimeo are all powered by Flash and all deliver the same content for free that Apple wants to be able to charge for.  This is where Apple dogma and Google dogma meet, and Adobe is simply a place for this war to be fought.

Adobe cannot win and remain sovereign in this battle.  Apple’s desktop platform is the chosen home for many creative’s who use Adobe’s landmark products like Photoshop and Fireworks.  Google owns YouTube, has built it’s own rich internet application framework, and fully backs the HTML5 standard that allows the modern web browser to do all of the things one could only do with the support of Flash in the past.  Google has Adobe smiling with a knife at their back.  For Google, the relationship is convenient to buy time until Android devices overtake Apple devices (likely in 2011).  Apple’s aggression gives Adobe little choice but to ally with the greater but less immediate threat.

Apple’s fatal flaw in this fight is not the control over development for their devices, but how users will get media delivery to those devices.  It’s not that Google is on the opposite side of the debate – they simply don’t care.  Google is a data company that is using mobile platforms as another tool for understanding their users as to maximize the ad revenue that has made them so successful.  Whether or not the user buys their content from Amazon or Apple or Walmart is inconsequential.  If the user clicked an ad for one of those companies to buy an MP3 and Google made $.05 from that click – it’s been a successful day for Google.  The Google approach is open solely because it maximizes revenue potential by maximizing the channels that can generate that revenue – not because of some religious developer fervor.

So Adobe can scream and yell at Apple all they want about openness and freedom.  They have the backing now of a much stronger, much better positioned ally that could turn on them at any minute.  One move for Adobe could be to find a way to exclusively integrate their products with iTMS.  Such a move would at least leverage them against any passive Google aggression.  But ultimately they are but a proxy in the coming Apple/Google apocalypse.  To me, it’s more curious that Apple has decided to bring this battle to such an intermediary first, rather than to try to stunt the emergent competition in Google head on.  It could well be that the cost of such a direct war would be so great to Apple that they’d rather not play offense but instead focus on defense – ensuring exclusivity of content delivery on Apple platforms.  It could also well be that we’ll be watching TV on our Android devices in 2015 and forwarding through the “I’m an Android.  I’m an iPhone.” commercials.  Only John Hodgman will be wearing the Steve Jobs mock turtleneck.