Photo: Matthew Yohe / Wikimedia Commons

The corporate soap opera that is Apple and Adobe, having started with the omission of iPhone Flash years back, has come to the point where Steve Jobs himself thought he should address the rumblings.

It isn’t business, it’s technology

In a measured, calm post on Apple’s website, Steve Jobs said that the severing of ties between Apple and Adobe is a technological move and not a business move, as Adobe have suggested.

Photo: Adobe

He goes on to reject the notion that Flash is an ‘open’ platform. ‘Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary’ since they are only available from Adobe, and Adobe ‘has sole authority’ when it comes to how it updates their technology in future.

We’re closed, too, but open where it counts

Jobs admits his iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad are proprietary products, too. But he’s insistent that the web remain open, and this is why they’ve adopted open platforms ‘HTML5, CSS, and Javascript’, with Apple having developed the WebKit that powers nigh-on every mobile phone browser bar Microsoft’s.

The reasons

Photo: Apple

Steve Jobs lists six reasons for not adopting Flash on his company’s mobile devices. These are the aforementioned ‘open platform’, full web, reliability, battery life shortcomings, touch interfaces, and what he calls the most important reason, having a third-party development platform come between developers and Apple and the side effects of that.

What, what?

In case you have not been keeping tabs, this open conflict comes as a result of the lack of iPhone Flash being repeated with iPad Flash omission, too. In the ongoing back and forth since then, people have told people to ‘go screw themselves’, licensing amendments have been made, developers have chimed in with their opinion, Adobe released the amazing Creative Suite 5 and Apple’s profit, earnings and share price skyrocketed. The world has all but gone on, but it is sad to see conflict between two companies that were once so close that Apple actually held a 20 per cent stake in Adobe.