Adobe lashes back at Apple’s on lazy remark

Adobe has lashed back at Apple CEO Steve Jobs' comment where he characterised Adobe as "lazy". According to Wired, at an event on January 30 Steve Jobs remarked that Adobe is lazy, Flash is buggy, and the world is moving toward HTML5 anyway. Whenever a Mac crashes, it is most frequently because of Flash, Jobs asserted.

A blog entry by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch responds to Job's comments. The blog begins taking a hit at Apple's just launched iPad, "Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device."

Lynch then goes on add that Flash was originally designed for "pen computing tablets, about 15 years before that market was ready to take off." He writes that Flash is currently used in more than 85% of the top Web sites, including Nike, Hulu, BBC and Major League Baseball. Also, Flash is a critical part of the smartphone market; Adobe is "on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google's Android, RIM's Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs." "Even the Nexus One will be Flash 10.1-equipped," according to Lynch.

Regarding HTML5 replacing Flash, he wrote, "If HTML could reliably do everything Flash" can, it would "certainly save us a lot of effort." But because Flash is still enabling more than 75% of Web video, Flash will be around "even as HTML advances."

Incidentally, this is not the first time that Apple and Adobe have clashed. Apple's been resisting user demands to add Flash to the iPhone for more than three years now. On March 6, 2008, Steve Jobs reportedly made another public jab at Adobe, saying that the Flash Lite Player wasn't "advanced enough" for use on the iPhone, and that it performed "too slow to be useful."