Bernard Meisler

First of all, he forgot to say “Namaste.”

Never mind that it is unseemly at best for a CEO to publicly attack the flagship product of a company that’s actually more of a quasi-partner than a competitor – imagine if the CEO of GM launched a public attack on Firestone tires after a recall? - Jobs’ diatribe was incredibly hypocritical.

I’m a Flash developer by trade and believe me, I am all too familiar with Flash’s down sides – the bugs, the CPU hogging – Jobs has a point. I wish Adobe would take care of this stuff.

That being said, Flash IS an open platform – you can create Flash movies without using any Adobe products at all. There’s a comprehensive list at osflash.org.

On the other hand, Apple is creating a VERTICAL closed platform – their hardware, their software. Imagine if you had to buy an Adobe computer to use PhotoShop?

But it gets worse, and I think many non-developers are missing the point. Flash has been banned from the iPhone environment for years now. What Apple just did is ban the ability to port software from the Flash IDE to the Apple Objective C format. In other words, not only do you have to use Apple’s hardware and Apple’s software, you now have to use Apple’s tools to build the software! Not even MicroSoft at its worst dared to do this…

And here’s the kicker – Adobe announced they were going to release a new version of the Flash IDE that would enable porting to the iPhone platform about 8 months ago. Lots of people thought it was really cool, that it would open the development of iPhone apps to a lot of folks who can’t be bothered to learn Apple’s arcane language of choice, Objective C. Adobe put a lot of time and money into developing this tool. So Jobs waits till 3 weeks before Adobe’s planned release of the new version of the Flash IDE to change its TOS to not allow iPhone apps created with anything other than Apple tools. This was tantamount to a declaration of war.

And before anybody can say, “Well those apps created on Flash will run poorly on the iPhone” I’ll respond that poorly written software will run poorly, no matter how and where it was created. There’s plenty of shoddy apps on the iTunes store right now. If Apple was truly concerned about the quality of the apps they’re selling, they would test for performance, effect battery life, etc – rather than unilaterally banning apps built a certain way.