14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has kicked off an ad campaign to address controversy over its Flash platform, and the company’s dispute with Apple. Via its advertising campaign, available both online, and in print media, the Flash maker sounds an alarm, pressing its support for openness on the Internet.
“We believe open markets that allow developers, publishers, and consumers to make their own choices about how they create, distribute, and access content are essential to progress,” Adobe states. “That's why we actively support technologies like HTML4, HTML5, CSS, and H.264, in addition to our own technologies. An open letter signed Adobe founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock points out to the company's history of publishing open specifications for its standards.”
On the matter of Adobe’s dispute with Apple, the former upholds, “We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web -- the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.”
Apple is eager to phase out Flash from pretty much everything tied to its portable devices (according to a similar such open letter posted by CEO Steve Jobs), outlining that, “[…] Letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.”
However, Adobe’s stance is at the other end of the spectrum. “In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody -- and everybody, but certainly not a single company,” the company developing the Flash platform concludes. Its recent ad campaign includes even a banner saying it loves Apple, but that it dislikes its decision to take away freedom “to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the web.”