Adobe's plans for iPhone Flash depend on your meaning of 'committed'
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.