The man has spoken. Steve Jobs himself has in fact posted his thoughts about the Flash platform in a pretty long “open letter to the community”, available here.
The post is interesting and worth checking out in its entirety, but just to sum up Steve’s thoughts:
“Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.”
Steve’s main concern is that Flash is a closed platform, with crappy performances on mobile devices and that can seriously cut the battery life of Apple’s devices. Overall, it seems like the whole letter is focused on mobile devices rather than desktop computers:
“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”
and
“Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.”
Now the situation gets very interesting. We’ll wait for a response from Adobe now.
