Apple’s reasons against Flash

Yesterday, Steve Jobs talked about his decision not to support Adobe Flash, when he got interviewed on the D8 Conference.

Being asked whether he doesn’t consider it unfair for customers not to support Flash contents on iPhone and iPad, he declared that Apple is not a company with unlimited resources. To have success, you have “to bet the right technological horse”. That is why Apple chooses technologies that have a future.

Jobs noted that Apple had been the first company to dump the floppy disk. Later, they were among the first ones adopting the USB interface. “Sometimes when we get rid of things, people call us crazy. But sometimes you just have to pick the things that are going to be the right horse to ride forward. And Flash has had its day, but HTML5 is starting to emerge. The video looks better and it works better and you don’t need a plug-in to run it. And while 75 percent of the video on the Web may be available in Flash, a lot of it is available in HTML5 as well,” the Apple CEO explained.

“We didn’t set out to have a war over Flash. We made a technical decision.” Jobs explained that it was Adobe who made an arguing topic out of it, when they had a problem with the iPad. Apple is getting tired that Adobe is talking bad about them. That’s why Steve Jobs noted his ‘Thoughts on Flash’ and published them.

Finally, Steve got asked what he is replying to people wishing Flash support on the iPad. “We’re just trying to make great products. We don’t think Flash makes a great product, so we’re leaving it out. Instead, we’re going to focus on technologies that are in ascendancy. If we succeed, people will buy them and if we don’t they won’t. And, so far, I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad. We are selling an iPad every 3 seconds.”