Apple and Adobe and Flash
The battle between Apple and Adobe over Flash is unusual, both in the public nature of the argument, and the strength of the feelings expressed.
“Go screw yourself Apple,” wrote Lee Brimelow, an Adobe platform evangelist, on his personal Web site, The Flash Blog…Adobe, evidently, was at least aware of the blog post just as it went live. The second paragraph mentions that a line was edited out on behalf of Adobe. The earlier version of the post apparently stated that “What is clear is that Apple has timed this purposely to hurt sales of CS5.”
Steve Jobs today personally replied ,
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short…Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games…New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
These are technical issues; Jobs’ reasoning made sense to me. You do wonder why, if Adobe wanted to port Flash produced apps to Apple devices, they didn’t just develop a Flash HTML5 compiler.
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In general the powers that be let everyone else fight for the crumbs while behind the scenes they make a profit and deflect. Now, it is almost as though the sour air of dispute, evident nearly everywhere in the media, has even poisoned the air of corporate board rooms.
Normally corporations are all about profit, all the time, and could care less what anyone thinks. They leave that to their public relations departments. But this battle between Adobe and Apple feels personal.
