Adobe kills Apple with love

Adobe has unveiled a new weapon in its war with Apple: love. A full-page ad by Adobe in the New York Times today blares in giant type: We love Apple (with a heart instead of the word love). It then lists all the things that it loves about Apple, developers, and technology, and then scathingly slips in the knife.

Adobe and Apple have been engaged in a very open war even since Apple banned Adobe tools to be used to build apps for the iPhone and iPad, and banned Flash from those devices. Steve Jobs says it was done because non-Apple tools could create sub-par apps, and says that Flash drains battery power and slows device performance. Adobe counters that it's all about money, and complains that Apple has become Big Brother.

Meanwhile, Apple may be facing an anti-trust investigation for its actions.

It's against that backdrop of all-out nastiness that Adobe released its love bomb today in the New York Times. Underneath the giant headline, Adobe starts to list all the reason it loves Apple:

We love creativity
We love innovation
We love apps
We love the web

All very nice, yes? Now comes the knife, with a nod or two to nice things about Apple:

We love Flash
We love our 3 million developers
We love healthy competition 
We love touch screens
We love our Open Screen Project partners
We love HTML4
We love authoring code only once
We love all devices
We love all platforms

Then comes the kicker, and the entire point of the ad:

What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and your experience on the web.