I guess its too much to ask for people to actually read the article. Aside from the lengthy, true paragraphs about how awful and unstable Flash is, the basic idea is that there's nothing wrong with proprietary software, but proprietary formats are kind of dumb. Which, y'know--if you're not an open source zealot--is pretty reasonable.
Except that he's, you know, advocating H.264.
Related: MS has started spreading FUD about Ogg Theora, and Jobs has allegedly written an
E-Mail asserting that there's about to be a patent suit over it.
Honestly Jobs is kind of being a fucking tool here. He has a laundry list of extremely good, hard to argue reasons for the decision, and keeps going back to the one that makes him look like the most self-unaware person on the planet.
This.
Like I said, I wholeheartedly support refusing to support Flash, because Flash sucks and somebody needs to force a new standard.
It's everything AFTER that that's fucked.
Adobe's rebuttal, on the other hand, puts into perspective why they're so understandably pissed: Apple just hamstrung Flash's interoperability, one of it's biggest selling points. Hell, I remember Thad actually suggesting a few years ago that an aspiring game developer could switch to Mac and comfortably use Flash for cross-platform development. That's still technically true... But it's not exactly tempting right now.
Worse than that, Jobs is actually howling that the very IDEA of cross-platform design is evil. He gripes at length about how long it took Adobe to implement Cocoa, and says that makes it "the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X" -- which I guess is true if you don't consider Microsoft Office to be major third-party software. And of course omits the fact that there are still FIRST-party Apple programs that haven't implemented Cocoa yet.
He's literally advocating that every piece of software be developed, from the ground up, for the single platform the binary is going to be run on. Which is not a very good position for a guy with 10% of the desktop market to take.
It's crazy 1960's stuff. I mean, I'll grant that a ported application is not going to work as well as it did on its native platform. (Just look at how awful iTunes for Windows is -- ZING!) But the idea that applications should therefore never be ported is fucking asinine. The entire history of software development has been a movement toward apps that work the same on different platforms. (I'm typing this in Firefox under Windows on a Mac -- I am a guy who cares about interoperability. Hell, I wouldn't have booted to Windows at all if I could fucking play Dragon Age in Linux.) Jobs wants to go back to the days before portable code. Before
C, for God's sake.
He wants what he's always wanted: tightly-controlled, very high-quality software that works predictably, exactly the way it's designed to, to the benefit of stability and usability but at the expense of user choice.
It's not an inherently bad goal (most users are happy to sacrifice choice in favor of stability and usability), but he's taken it to a truly ludicrous extreme.