There’s give and take with Steve Jobs. He gives a great presentation, then hunkers down in a town hall meeting with employees and assigns blame where he feels it should be placed. Following the most recent incident when Jobs cited a lack of Flash on the iPhone or iPad due to Flash’s buggy nature and Adobe’s “laziness”, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch responded with a blog post claiming Flash is “ready” for the iPhone and iPad.
In the post, Lynch dissected the arguments made against Flash, including one that claimed Flash had closed users off to a significant amount of content on the web:
“Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device. Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content and Flash running on over 98% of computers on the Web… It is used for the majority of casual games, video, and animation on the Web and familiar brands like Nike, Hulu, BBC, Major League Baseball, and more rely on Flash to deliver the most compelling experiences to over a billion people.”
Lynch then went on to work to debunk the idea that Flash wasn’t ready for the iPhone or other mobile platforms:
“The Flash engineering team has taken this on with a major overhaul of the mainstream Flash Player for a variety of devices. We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs.”
Finally, Lynch stated that Adobe is “ready to enable Flash in the browser on [Apple’s] devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.”
One reply on “Adobe CTO Argues Jobs’ Criticisms in Recent Blog Post”
Looks like this one will run and run. Flash Developers can’t be bothered to learn how to develop for iPhone and are waiting for Adobe to release an iPhone Flash plugin, where as Apple want Flash Developers to still sign up as Apple Developers and then pay to have their apps released through the App Store. Will be interesting to see how this pans out and who wins the day but looks like Apple is in no hurry to release Flash for iPhone anytime soon.