There is always going to be a lowest common denominator platform. That used to be Windows. Now it’s the web. Apple doesn’t build lowest common denominator platforms. Before, when Windows was the LCD, Apple was in a hard place because they were locked out of that platform: their platform was at odds with it. Now, with the web as the LCD, Apple has it both ways: their platforms gracefully coexist with it. Apple isn’t a web company, but the web might be the best thing that ever happened to them.

From Apple’s perspective, when it comes to software platforms, theirs is best (Cocoa/Cocoa Touch), because they have complete control. Everyone’s is good (the web), because Apple has control over their own implementation and can influence the future direction of the standards. What Apple doesn’t want is someone else’s proprietary platform, where they have no control at all. That’s what Flash is.

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This is an incredibly astute point from John Gruber about the saga of Flash on the iPhone and iPad. Implicit in John’s post is that Adobe wants Flash, not that uncontrollable phenomenon known as “the web”, to emerge as the next generation lowest common denominator platform.

You’ll probably remember that a while back, something called “Rich Internet Applications” emerged as the next great platform battle, with the major players being Adobe with Flash/Flex/AIR, Microsoft with Silverlight and Google with web apps based on HTML, CSS, javascript (with GWT) and offline access via Gears. The RIA promise was to marry the access-anywhere nature of the the web with the experience of using a native application, which may sound suspiciously like yet another twist on the idea of write once, run anywhere with the addition of cloud storage, itself a variation of thin client computing. It seems like the idea of new, non-web based RIA platforms is shaping up about as well as those other grand ideas, which is to say, not well at all.

Missing from all of the hype and bluster about RIA was what Apple might do – they didn’t come out and announce additions to Objective C or some new platform to rival Flash or Silverlight. What they did do was continue building WebKit, the best web rendering engine for mobile and desktop browsers, and advancing and promoting standards like HTML 5. That strategy seems to be bearing out pretty well – Google, both a partner and competitor, continues to promote the strategy of using open standards and has adopted the specific implementation of WebKit for their own projects. They even deprecated their own Gears project in favor of HTML 5’s offline support. Microsoft and Adobe, meanwhile, continue to believe that they can supersede “the web” with their own proprietary platforms. John is spot on here, that Apple cares first and foremost about its native platforms while still providing a first class experience for the new lowest common denominator without needing to become the lowest common denominator.

As someone who spent years as a Flash developer and who still manages a team of bright and capable developers with a lot of Flash expertise, I have to say that the only platform I’m really excited about these days is “the web” specifically the future that HTML 5, CSS 3 and javascript libraries like jQuery portend. Flash was interesting for so long because it let us do things we couldn’t do otherwise – vector animation, audio and video playback, motion graphics. Over the past few years, though, the number of problems that Flash uniquely solves versus the number of problems that Flash creates has all but leveled out.