Adobe Answers Back, Suggests Apple Raised Walls Around the iPad

During the January 27 keynote address focused on the Apple iPad, Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) demoed many of the tablet’s key features, including its ability to provide a great Internet experience. However, the Apple iPad, just like the iPhone and iPod touch, lacks Flash support, a move that Apple’s CEO believes will force the adoption of HTML5. Adobe, the company developing Flash, is not at all pleased with this approach.

Not only does Apple refuse to have Flash on its devices (for a variety of reasons, some of which are well justified), but its CEO actually dislikes Adobe altogether, going by people hearing Jobs talking at a meeting behind closed doors. Apple’s head reportedly said that Apple did not support Flash because it was so buggy. He allegedly cited numerous system crashes because of the plugin, and reportedly decided, “The world is moving to HTML5.”

Now, Adobe’s Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Lynch, has a few words to say as well. He begins by outlining that, “Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device.” Actually, “some” is an understatement, but those familiar with Apple’s M.O. aren’t surprised at all.

“Our mission at Adobe is to revolutionize how people engage with ideas and information, and we focus daily on how to best empower designers and developers to express themselves most fully and creatively,” his latest blog post reads.

“To have the greatest creative control combined with the most productive tools and broadest ability to deploy their content and applications. We support whatever technologies and formats that best enable our customers to accomplish these goals, and work to drive technology forward where there are gaps that we can fill. The blend of Flash and HTML are best together, enabling anyone to make pragmatic decisions to use these for their strengths to make the best experiences on the Web.”

Referring to Apple’s closed ecosystem and business model, Lynch goes for Apple’s jugular. “This model of open access has proven to be more effective in the long term than a walled approach, where a manufacturer tries to determine what users are able to see or approves and disapproves individual content and applications. We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications regardless of your viewing device.”

Do share your opinion on this. However, we should remind everyone that while Adobe praises openness, Flash isn’t an open standard either, just to be clear on that.