Most companies equate success with growth; like waistlines in ancient times, size becomes an indication of prosperity. But Sagmeister believes that remaining small has been the key to retaining his integrity as a designer and making ideas happen. He explains, “The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive. We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients. We actually have a rather good track record, because we do select projects carefully. Most of our ideas don’t eat dust but glimpse the light of day because we find it much more helpful to spend some serious time and effort before we start working on a project, rather than suffer through it afterwards.
Stefan Sagmeister: Life So Far :: Articles :: The 99 Percent
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As a creative digital agency owner _and_ developer, I’d like to offer up my take on the whole Adobe VS Apple beef that’s been brewing for a while and letting you in on how it affects agencies like us.
Generally speaking, our clients give us money to produce “things”: 1) idea / strategy things, 2) production things, or 3) R&D / nontraditional things.
It doesn’t matter to us if we’re creating something that’s built in Flash, Cocoa, or JavaScript. We’re in the business of producing and marketing cool digital / technology “things”.
I know I sound like a douchebag, but despite all the press releases, award show speeches, and case studies… our clients couldn’t care less about how we do it either. At the end of the day, we get paid to deliver our clients a combination of “things”, by a certain time, and produce them in a professional way.
For a client, the equation of making things is super simple:
- Here is a bunch of money
- give me what I want by a certain time.
- If I like how you did everything, I’ll come back for more later.
We are still _really_ looking forward to the CS5 iPhone Packager coming out officially because it allows us to rapidly create cool “things”. I’m sure that someone will figure out a way to get around the cross-compiler ban anyways.
As marketers _and_ developers, it gives us the ability to build a microsite, and quickly port portions of that site into a location based iPhone app, or a branded iPad game and launch both “things” at the same time.
That sounds awesome right? Produce a dope site and companion applications on different devices, at the same time, while working with one agency. If you’re a client this is perrrrfect!
Whether or not Apple bans cross-compilers, this is what clients are going to be expecting of their production partners.
This is also why if Adobe keeps handling its PR the same way, they are gonna lose completely. Apple is very good at managing the perception of the performance of its products. Adobe is not.
Apples Big Lie
I think its a valid argument that this is actually about platform control. But taken at face value, I totally get the performance argument from Apples POV. You’ve got a lightweight OS running on hardware with limited resources. At the same time you’re trying to offer up desktop-like feedback to non nerdy people like my parents, who just want something that works.
Based on that argument, anything that makes the iphone, or the ipad seem slow (like flash), translates to a business risk. This is one of the reasons why Apple can reject your buggy-ass iPhone app you just did, if it sucks, they don’t want it tarnishing their platform.
So in the interim… Apple says to do it all with HTML 5.
I don’t take it at face value though… HTML 5 is not an acceptable alternative. We just launched a site for DEVO. From a development perspective, its a SUPER SIMPLE site. But I can’t do the same thing in HTML 5.
If Apple allows flash based iPhone apps its a slippery slope to be able to say ‘hey guys you’re letting in flash based apps on the store, why not flash on safari?’. Either way Apple loses the only thing they care about, performance, and thusly perception.
Adobe & Flash Developers’ PR Stupidity
Don’t get me wrong. I love Adobe products, and ironically I wouldn’t be able to buy all the Apple gear I own if it weren’t for them. However, Adobe and its developers both inside and outside the company need to stop acting like babies. I read today on my twitter feed that some flash developer out there is selling all his apple stuff in protest. Seriously pal, who cares.
I’m not shitting on the developers involved, because I absolutely seriously respect them but adobe needs to stop producing videos showing off how you can produce one app that resizes itself on 5 devices, and show me something creatively awesome.
COOOME ON GUYS… this isn’t a platform argument. Do you think my _clients_ give a shit if we, as developers can create an application that resizes on 5 screens? Nope. As developer I think thats totally freaking awesome, but it doesn’t matter.
Remember the equation of making things? Client gives me money, expects a result, doesn’t care how I do it or how much of a pain it is for me. My clients want us to produce cool things for them by a certain time. Period.
Adobe should have shown me how easy it would be for North Kingdom to take the rolling dice from the Get the Glass game and port it to a simplified minigame on the iPhone. Instead, for interactivity I get a seamless 360 degree panorama thing. /facepalm
This leads me to believe that maybe the cross compiler isn’t that awesome because instead of dopetastic examples, we’d get csbuzz, a site with a bunch of people telling us ‘trust me this is great’. Who gives a shit? Not my clients. Everyone in advertising depends on Adobe Products. Adobe, nobody is using CorelDraw anymore, so you don’t need to convince us to buy your products.
In every major SDK release that requires some sort of Apple Developer Preview, Apple _ALWAYS_ brings out a developer who will tell you that ‘hey it only took us 1 hour / day / minute to port our code to {insert new api / sprocket / religion here}’. You should be doing the same. Why?
Because if Apple enforces this cross compiler ban that everyone is talking about, it’s going to make things MUCH more expensive for my clients. Mind you, these are the same clients who are going to go gaga over iAds. Why is that? Because Steve Jobs spoke about 1 BILLION ad opportunities daily and spoke about EMOTION.
These clients want to spend as little as possible on production, and more on media buys and promotion. They want to be the first to produce branded applications and magazines on the iPad just for the buzzfactor alone.
Show me something that makes a compelling CREATIVE argument, that performance won’t ACTUALLY be shit, that you’ve pulled off an engineering miracle and made a bytecode interpreter that produces a compiled binary that runs AWESOME on the phone. My client won’t give a crap about the technical stuff, but if they know they can save money, they will. Either way, I’m looking forward to the full release of the iPhone packager.
There are few things that annoy me more than tech blog journalism. They are constantly writing articles about things that they don’t know about or based on stupid assumptions in order to get page views. Look at this article…they think people use the iPad on the weekend…IT’S ONLY 12PM ON MONDAY AND THIS THING CAME OUT ON SATURDAY. How can you seriously write an article on this?
Also, no crap people use their phones more during the week. This is so lazy.
