Steve Jobs hates Flash (and Ada luvs Chaz)

It's IT Blogwatch: in which Steve Jobs opens fire on Adobe Flash. Not to mention the first (female) computer scientist: a hard-drinking, adulterous, enchantress of numbers...

Jonny Evans reports:

Don't look for any Flash content on the iPhone anytime soon ... Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on record to warn that the iPhone needs a Flash Player that works like it does on a computer, warning that the Flash Lite Player that Adobe Systems Inc. develops for mobile phones isn't sufficiently advanced for an iPhone. "Proper" Flash "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, Jobs warned ... [although he] insisted that Apple maintains a good relationship with Adobe all the same. more

Seth Weintraub adds:

As Apple is a super-secretive organization, any information out of the company gets picked over with a fine-toothed comb. Yesterday's shareholder meeting is no exception. more

Charles Jade offers this gem: [You're fired -Ed.]

Rumors of Flash on the iPhone continue to percolate upwards from the depths of Internet message boards and six-figure analysts' research notes ... [but] Jobs asserted that Flash ran too slowly on the iPhone—which is another way of saying the iPhone isn't fast enough to run Flash ... it seems clear that the "good" relationship that Apple and Adobe enjoy does not include working on Flash for the iPhone ... Whether you love or hate Microsoft, the company does have the resources to compete with Adobe. For that matter, just the possibility of Apple allying with Microsoft to push Silverlight might make Apple's good relationship with Adobe even better. more

Jack Schofield puffs away:

This is likely to upset Adobe, because its strategy is for Flash to be ubiquitous, but it probably doesn't matter much to Jobs. The number of lost sales because the iPhone lacks Flash is probably pretty small, because iPhone sales are themselves pretty small. If it does become a significant barrier, then Apple can easily add it. In the meantime, not supporting Flash (and Java) allows Apple more control over applications on the iPhone. more

John Paczkowski repeats a naughty word:

“Too slow to be useful.” “Not capable of being used on the Web.” That’s a disparaging way of describing the products of a partner with whom you’ve had strained relations over the years, isn’t it. Certainly, it’s not the most diplomatic. But then Jobs isn’t exactly renowned for his diplomacy. As a recent profile of him Fortune explains, “Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are ‘insanely great’ or ’****’ … Subordinates are geniuses or ‘bozos,’ indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second’s notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his ‘hero-****head roller coaster.’” more

But Robert Scoble thinks different:

I have not substantiated this with anyone at either Adobe or Apple, so might turn out to be totally false ... [my source] says that he’s seen Flash running on an iPhone in a lab and that it’s been running for quite a while and that it’s not a technical issue that caused Steve Jobs to go public about not putting Adobe’s Flash on the iPhone ... [but that] Adobe is playing hardball with Apple over their PDF renderer. “Adobe wants Apple to use the Adobe PDF renderer.” His thesis? Steve Jobs is playing hard to get to get Adobe to give up this demand.. more

John Gruber notes the possible background to that:

Apple and Adobe aren’t enemies, but they’re certainly competitors, and the history between the two companies is not entirely warm ... NeXT’s operating system graphics system was built entirely around Display Postscript, a technology NeXT licensed from Adobe ... the terms were such that the source code for Display Postscript never left Adobe’s campus — to work on the code, NeXT engineers had to go to Adobe and work in an isolated room with no outside network access. There are people at Apple who remember this arrangement vividly, and not fondly. more

But Jordan Golson just cheers:

Some whiners say what the iPhone provides isn't the real Internet, because it lacks Flash. No kidding, donkeys: It's way better. Thank you, Steve Jobs, for saving us from Flash websites -- the 2008 version of the <BLINK> tag. more

And finally...

• Ada Lovelace: prophet of the computer age
  

Buffer overflow:

• Peter Kafka: Bill Gates Made $2.8 Billion More Than You Last Year
• F-Secure: Unlocking Windows Using FireWire
• Phil Windley: John McCarthy on the Elephant Programming Language
• Adam Ostrow: AOL Launches Open AIM 2.0 – The Most Important Social Platform Yet?
• Gary Beach: Study Links Math/Science Skills to Economic Growth
• Coding Horror: CAPTCHA is Dead, Long Live CAPTCHA!
• Stephen Wildstrom: Tech Beat How encryption fails
• PC Mechanic: Microsoft Developing From Scratch OS

Other Computerworld bloggers:

• Preston Gralla: Beware: IE 8 hosed my system!
• Mike Elgan: Censorship with your free Wi-Fi?
• Preston Gralla: Vista Hack: How to speed up search
• Mark Hall: PCI compliance woes
• Michael R. Farnum: Learn the VA lesson NOW
• Seth Weintraub: Corey Carson at AFP548 has posted AD-OD and Leopard Server guides
• Shark Tank: How to save money
• Shark Bait: How to dispose of large numbers of drives

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/adviser/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and spam. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. You too can pretend to be Richi's friend on Facebook, or just use boring old email: blogwatch@richi.co.uk.

Previously in IT Blogwatch:

• Office Live Workspace ready for beta testing (and WoMP)
• USAF email security SNAFU in UK (and no-shorts.ar)
• Spammer jailed, 'cos spam ain't free speech (and 207 stiffs)