Steve Jobs Writes Open Letter Regarding Flash

For quite a while, there’s been a storm brewing between Adobe and Apple, and until recently, no one has been paying much attention. But over the course of the past couple of weeks, things have simply exploded, and both Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, and Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe, have been extremely vocal in their respective opinions.

The entire situation flared up when Apple decided to reaffirm its stance that Flash simply wasn’t going to happen on the iPhone, iPad, or any other device like them. Steve Jobs stated various reasons for the action, but it mostly boiled down to security and the lack of overall flexibility. Fair enough, I guess.

But just when you thought the debate was simmering down, Steve Jobs pulled a trick out of his hat and posted an open letter of sorts to the front-page of Apple’s homepage. In it, he describes all of the reasons that Flash won’t happen on Apple’s mobile platforms.

I’m not on either team here, because on one hand, I don’t usually care for what Apple does, and on the other, Flash has never proven itself to me to be that reliable of a platform (though I’d still -never- want to use the Web today  without it). But when I saw Jobs pointing out the fact that Flash was a proprietary product, I couldn’t help but laugh. We’re talking about the CEO of Apple, a company that makes most of its money based on proprietary products, software or otherwise.

For the first five years of iTunes’ life, music purchased there could only be played back on iPod’s and other Apple-supported devices. Then we have the App Store. Nothing on the App Store, unless the developer coded it otherwise (and released it via other means), is able to be run except on Apple’s own devices. You can’t simply hop on and purchase an App and have it work on any other phone. It’s that simple. So overall, the proprietary argument is humorous at best.

Flash isn’t perfect, as I mentioned, but it’s robust enough to be considered a very worthwhile platform to have support for. Many, MANY of the online games around the Web have Flash at the base, so for an Apple device to simply not support it means a lot to some people. The fact that Flash is such a standard base to online games is the reason many think Jobs is adamant about supporting it.

After all, let’s consider the fact that Apple makes a bag-full of money every second of the day that apps get sold on the App Store. Now consider the fact that many of those apps sold are games. Then look at the fact that many of the games online are built in Flash, and are usually provided for free. It’s not too hard to jump to conclusions here.

Regardless of what you think of the situation, it’s hard to not at least agree with the fact that people should have choice. If Flash is such a horrible platform and you agree with Jobs, then don’t install it. But on the other hand, if you do want the support and better support for the Web, then you should at least have the option, not have the device vendor make the decision for you.

What do you guys think?

Oh, and if you wish to get Shantanu’s thoughts on things, you can read through a transcript of an interview done by the Wall Street Journal.

Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.