RSSAdobe's plans for iPhone Flash depend on your meaning of 'committed'
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published March 20, 2008, 3:50 PM
Is Flash coming to the iPhone or not? For two consecutive days now, Adobe has said it wants to make that possible. But the way it's handling the issue has the press parsing every participle for latent meaning.
A statement from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen during the Q&A session of his company's quarterly earnings call last Tuesday appeared to indicate his company was actively pursuing the production of a Flash component for the Apple iPhone. That's how quite a few press sources reported the story, including BetaNews.
But as our story yesterday also indicated quite clearly, Adobe stopped well short of stating how it planned to work with Apple to achieve this goal.
When Adobe's press relations team issued a statement yesterday that purported to "clarify" Narayen's remarks, many sources took it to be some kind of retraction, reporting a "U-turn" had taken place. But as has been the case with Adobe + Apple stories since, it appears, the dawn of time, not only does viewpoint depend on where you stand, but also upon whether you're standing where the other side wants you to stand.
Thus Adobe's clarification yesterday began a second round of speculation and misinterpretation of the company's progress and its motives. Here is precisely what Narayen said on Tuesday:
So we're also committed to, you know, bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone, and we'll work with Apple. We've evaluated the SDK, we can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves. And we think it benefits our joint customers, so we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.
Narayen's statement makes clear that his company wants to work with Apple, as opposed to any notion that it is working with Apple. Couple this now with the company's clarification statement yesterday:
One interpretation of this clarification is that Adobe is making its negotiation stance public, stating it needs something more, in response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs making his stance very public, saying his side needs something more as well. And from one angle, the clarification seems perfectly compatible with Narayen's original statement -- especially the final sentence, which may as well have been read from the same cheat sheet.
But now the clarification is being perceived as a "U-turn" or a "backtrack" on Narayen's statement, partly because Adobe's CEO invoked the word "committed." Now, press sources are saying the company must not be so committed, due in large part to the optical illusion of sorts caused by Adobe's having felt it needed to issue a clarification in the first place.
Steve Jobs said that Flash wasn't good enough for the iPhone, the truth is that he lies, he said that the iPhone had Mac OSX and Full Safari, but the truth is that the iPhone doesn't have real OSX so they cant support real flash (like in a real computer) for such plug-in support they have to modify a lot of the iPhone semi-OS. So the real answer is that the iPhone is not good enough for Flash.
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You're changing the words.
The truth is that Flash doesn't work very well on any platform. It may work better on one platform than another but it never works well.
iPhone might benefit from Flash but the first thing I find that should be eliminated on most web pages is the Flash content. It can be advantageous but it usually isn't.
According to the development requirements for the iPhone, Flash and Java both are not allowed because they allow the execution of other applications.
Another concern would be the bandwidth use, as mobile providers want to keep data access to a minimum.
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puk em ...
Id say the iphone needs flash more then flash needs the iphone. Just try using the internet without flash and it looks half finished. Im sure playing flash games on the iphone would sell it for apple, and as such they should be encouraging it.
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