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.

So when I posted an innocuous message questioning the value of the tool I had just used, I got an immediate response.  To me, this is the type of gratification that people get (or used to get) from setting their Facebook status.  Or Tweeting.  Social media, from the consumer’s perspective – is virtual screaming.  Just without the caps lock key.  It’s everyone’s way of saying look over here, it’s me, I like politics and I love books and I have a cold and does anyone want to grab a drink tonight? What Facebook realizes increasingly (and Twitter, always resistant to changing their innate simplicity, has gave a moment’s thought to) is that eventually you have so many contacts, so many friends, so many followers, so many people who follow you that the signal to noise becomes unbearable without some sort of filter.  All of the conversations, statuses, likes, fandoms, retweets, hashtags, and groups eventually just become an incessant buzz, and we stop paying attention to a lot of it.

The immediate response was a result of having all of 14 people paying attention.  Compare that to the 150 people I’m connected to on Facebook.  Or the paltry 80 or so followers I have on Twitter.  My satisfaction with the experience with Google Buzz at that moment was purely a result of it’s infancy. But the buzz grew immediately louder.  I then noticed that the buzz had gotten into my GMail inbox.  To a guy who likes the mantra of Inbox: 0, this was distressing.  Part of the deal with Twitter which elevates it appeal over Facebook is that it is a pretty passive social media.  Direct messages infect your inbox, but those are fairly rare.  Simple replies to your tweets or even mentions can just fade to noise.  But now that there was a level of replication between ubiquitous social exchange and my more formal communication in email – Buzz had taken the most invasive and distracting part about Facebook and actively decided to emulate it.

At least Google Wave, while useless for my everyday interactions (though potentially useful elsewhere) lived out on an island that I could blissfully ignore.

I think that Wave, Buzz, and GMail eventually need to work out whether or not they’re the same thing or different things.  Facebook is looking to build a “GMail Killer,” and so it seems there is some idea out there that people don’t like email and would rather live in a world where the overwhelming noise of social media permeates everything.  It’s clear that for Google, taking email and putting eyes on the inbox with greater frequency will lead to more exposure to advertisers and inherently, more ad revenue.  But Facebook has ALWAYS had this model and hasn’t been able to consistently demonstrate that users will give advertisers the chance through all of the other noise.

It’s tempting to say that people will ultimately reject this model and the invisible hand of the market will demonstrate that when the inbox becomes too busy, people will just tune it out.  Google has provided options for getting Buzz out of your inbox.  But given the potential upside, particularly in Google’s business model, I’m also unconvinced they won’t try to force this particular feature right down their user’s throats.