After months of sniping and grumbling at Adobe, Apple boss Steve Jobs didn’t leave anything to interpretation in his open letter on the company’s site.
It has to be admitted, the controversial letter, in which he argues against the use of Flash, is extremely persuasive, if a little long. It’s clear in its point and comes across very professional.
Jobs’ take on the subject at a question & answer session for Apple employees was not so diplomatically phrased.
“They are lazy”, Jobs said of Adobe. “They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it.”
As an explanation for the decision, Jobs – true to his style – simply stated that it’s because Flash is so “buggy”.
“Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5.”
Adobe reacted to the Jobs’ attack by announcing its move away from Apple to focus on developing Flash on other manufacturers’ mobile devices. Embarrassingly, in their recent Flash demo disaster, Adobe only managed to demonstrate the mobile version continuously crashing.
Let go of the past, will you!
Apple’s position with regards to Flash has been critisised of being based on business reasons, that is, pure greed, but the company itself insists there are logical, technical issues behind its decision.
“The mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short”, Jobs proclaims in his letter.
The structure of the argument goes like this:
#1 Adobe Flash is too proprietary.
#2 Not all web video content is in Flash.
#3 Flash has got one of the worst security records in 2009.
#4 It doesn’t perform well on mobile devices.
#5 It’s a battery muncher.
#6 It’s designed for mouse-usage and doesn’t marry well with touch screens.
#7 And most importantly, it’s against everyone’s benefits to let a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer (if Adobe would encourage developers to use Flash to create mobile apps)
Critics of Apple should embrace the mobile era with HTML5 and stop criticising Apple for leaving the past behind, Jobs concluded.
Kill or be killed
As for the claims about money being behind the decision, John Gruber, a technology blogger and Apple enthusiast, reminded “the hypocrites”, as he calls them, that at the end of the day, Apple is a business – not a charitable organisation.
Gruber also made the point that the industry operates by the kill-your-enemies-before-they-kill-you rule.
He wrote: “Do customers benefit from what Apple is doing? In the short term, maybe not. But long term, absolutely. Because by putting up with what Apple is doing now, customers are helping to ensure that Apple stays in business and that its competitors die. That, more than anything else, is the reason to continue buying Apple products. I don’t see how anyone argues with the logic here.”
Read Jobs’ letter in full:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Case Study
The curious case of Steve Jobs
From start to finish, the Apple CEO is a man of contradictions. A young Steve Jobs, starting out in the working life, was faced between an unusual choice between the business world and the Buddhist monastery – to make a living of selling gadgets to masses or to devote his life to a famously non-materialist faith. Read more…
Tags: adobe, apple, Flash, steve jobs
Posted in Articles