What Steve Jobs Said During His Wall Street Journal iPad Demo
We know that Apple's CEO is no fan of Flash, the Web animation software. But it sounds like Steve Jobs really unleashed on the Adobe system to try and convince the Wall Street Journal to ditch it for the iPad.
Context & Ripple Effects
This leak lands eight days after the Wall Street Journal itself reported how the iPad magnifies Apple's Flash feud, and the same day Daring Fireball circulated Holman Jenkins' op-ed arguing Apple is 'getting all Microsofty.' What Gawker adds is the scene behind those abstractions: a confirmed Jobs demo to Journal executives in which he harshly criticized Adobe's Flash and pressed the paper to drop it in exchange for iPad distribution.
The pickup footprint was modest — one syndicated echo at GottaBeMobile framing the attack as putting iPad credibility on the line — but the demo sits inside a broader February courtship of media companies: Jobs is separately pushing iTunes TV-show price cuts with partial CBS support, so format demands are arriving alongside distribution offers.
First-order effects
- The Wall Street Journal now faces a concrete fork on its planned iPad edition: ship without Flash video and animation, or risk losing placement on the most hyped tablet launch of 2010.
- Adobe's Flash loses ground at exactly the moment it matters most — its ubiquity across the Web counts for nothing on a device whose owner is actively lobbying launch partners away from it.
Second-order effects
- Other publishers weighing iPad editions will read the Journal's answer as the template: if a flagship news brand accepts a no-Flash deal, competitors face pressure to match rather than hold out for format neutrality.
- Content partners in parallel negotiations — like the TV networks weighing Jobs' iTunes price-cut push — learn that Apple bundles distribution access with technical and pricing demands, sharpening the leverage in every media deal this cycle.
Third-order effects
- If a platform owner can shift Web formats by withholding shelf space, standard-setting migrates from open Web processes toward whoever controls device distribution — turning the 'getting all Microsofty' critique from rhetoric into a structural question regulators and rivals will eventually have to address.
The trend: Platform owners are converting app-store and device distribution control into de facto authority over which Web technologies publishers may use, with early-2010 content deals as the lever.