Who's right about Flash? Apple's Steve Jobs or Adobe's Shantanu Narayen (reader poll)
Appled chief executive Steve Jobs wrote a missive today about why Apple doesn’t use Adobe’s Flash platform in its products. He gave a lot of technical reasons and touted superior technologies for playing video such as H.264 and the stability of the HTML5 standard. That’s why you don’t see it in products such as Apple’s iPad or iPhone. The argument pits two big companies that used to be allies — Apple was Adobe’s first major customer and once owned 20 percent of it — against each other in a war of words. Jobs challenged Adobe to improve its products and get behind open standards.
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen fired back and denied that Flash had flaws such as excessive power consumption. He argued that Apple’s own technical team is to blame for the failure of the Mac OS to support Flash. Both accuse the other of being excessively closed.
Who’s right? Please take our poll and explain your own position in the comments.
Who’s right about Flash, Apple or Adobe?Market Research
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About the Author, Dean Takahashi
Dean is lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He covers video games, security, chips and a variety of other subjects. Dean previously worked at the San Jose Mercury News, the Wall Street Journal, the Red Herring, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Times Herald. He is the author of two books, Opening the Xbox and the Xbox 360 Uncloaked. Follow him on Twitter at @deantak, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.
