WSJ: Adobe bows in Apple Feud

[bjanes]

The marketplace section of today's Wall Street Journal had an interesting article regarding relations between Adobe and Apple. Adobe indicated on Wednesday that it will no longer push it's Flash software for use in browser programs that come with smart phones and tablet computers. Instead, Adobe will increase its support for HTML5. The move came after Adobe cut 750 jobs and shares in the company dropped 7.7% to $28.08. It was not stated that the cuts were related to the Flash decision or to other factors.

The fundamental dispute between Apple and Adobe was over who controlled key software standards that. Steve Jobs was quoted in Walter Isaacson's biography of Mr. jobs as recounting an incident in 1999 when Mr. Jobs requested that Adobe produce a Mac version of Premiere.Adobe declined their requests since there were too few Mac users at that time. Mr. Jobs was quoted, "My primary insight when we were screwed by Adobe in 1999 was that we should get into any business where we didn't control both the hardware and the software, otherwise we get our heads handed to us".

Apple can be a fickle partner as Adobe learned when the 64 bit version of the Mac operating system was revised without advanced notice, and Adobe had to redo their work for a 64-bit version of Photoshop, resulting in a delay in it's release of the 64-bit version of Photoshop.

Does anyone have insight into what's going on here? if Apple is going to discontinue producing the Mac professional, perhaps they are not dependent on Adobe producing software that would be a run on that machine.

Regards,

Bill

[feppe]

You give Apple too much credit (yes, credit) for effectively killing Flash. Google had more to do with it, as they have been pushing HTML 5 for probably longer than Apple and have much bigger sway in the online world than Apple - including mobile.

I bet Apple would like their own proprietary codecs and closed standards to fully control the user experience and continue collecting the 30% Apple Tax, but fortunately for us consumers content providers have started fighting back, and HTML 5 is fast becoming a standard instead.