del.icio.us - Love it or hate it, Adobe’s Flash is one of the Web’s most prominent technologies. But when Apple released the iPhone in 2007, support for Flash was conspicuously absent from the device’s Web browser. Since then, the lack of Flash on the iPhone—and whether it's more detrimental to Apple or Adobe—has remained the topic of an almost constant speculation, peppered with occasional volleys from both companies.
While the back-and-forth between the two has yet to escalate into an out-and-out conflict, reading between the lines makes it clear that there’s more than a little disagreement over the future of Flash on the iPhone—or whether indeed it even has a future.
In March 2008, during Apple’s annual shareholder meeting, Steve Jobs was asked about Flash and his response was textbook Jobs: Adobe’s desktop Flash program was too intensive for the iPhone, and its mobile-oriented Flash Lite product just wasn’t good enough. “There’s this missing product in the middle,” Jobs told Apple shareholders. “It just doesn’t exist.”
Read More
