The Telegraph has published a lengthy and fascinating interview with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen. Most of the interview focuses on Adobe’s deteriorated relationship with Apple, particularly Apple’s refusal to allow Adobe’s Flash Player to run on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Narayen had many things to say during the interview, but here’s the bottom line: “They’ve made their choice. We’ve made ours and we’ve moved on.”
Narayen continues to characterize Apple’s shunning of Flash as a business decision rather than one based on technical considerations: “There are companies that are choosing to provide a complete end-to-end experience and control every aspect of it and want all the business model gains from it,” he says. “There are other companies that have chosen to say that the open eco-system is the way to go and that’s how you would contrast Apple and Google’s business models. We’re on the side of the open.”
It’s interesting that Adobe, purveyor of some of the most ubiquitous proprietary software out there, keeps using that word, “open,” without any sense of irony. But regardless of whether Flash can rightly be characterized as “open” or not, this latest word from Adobe’s top executive proves one thing for certain: Flash is not coming to iOS devices. Not now, not in the near future, and probably not ever.
Adobe is working with “19 out of 20” handset companies to get Flash working on their devices, with Apple as the lone holdout. Will Apple’s continued anti-Flash stance hurt its iOS device sales in the long run? Probably not. Many pundits predicted the iPad would be a market failure because it lacked support for Flash video, and yet its sales have taken even Apple by surprise. The iPhone 4 continues to sell out worldwide nearly two months after its debut, and it doesn’t run Flash, either. Following an expected refresh of the iPod touch’s hardware next month, Apple will sell millions of them over the holiday quarter, and not one of them will support Flash. Adobe needs Flash to run in iOS far more than Apple does, and if sales are anything to go by, more than most iOS users do, too.
Narayen says Adobe’s “doors are open” if Apple decides to change its stance on Flash. However, it’s highly unlikely that Apple will ever open its doors to Flash, so as far as this debate goes, it really is time to move on.
[Via Mac Rumors]
TUAWAdobe on Flash in iOS: ‘We’ve moved on’ originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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