Blah, blah, Apple CEO Steve Jobs addressed the “Flash issue” today…
The letter has some great points, almost all of which appeared in John Gruber’s Apple, Adobe and Flash which Jobs now infamously referenced in an email response to Greg Slepak, CEO of TaoEffect.
But this is the part I love the most:
This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms.
Apple knows that their hold on the market in the future depends on rapid innovation to maintain their lead over all other platforms. They are not about to let some other company slow down adoption by developers of their new technologies. Look at Photoshop. If built using much of the Core Services aimed right at graphics creation and manipulation, the app would be more integrated with the system, potentially offer more services and better performance and could actually once again look like a native Mac app. Instead, Adobe must make compromises to keep feature sets identical to the Windows version. And to add insult, the Mac versions are released after the Windows versions.
