Open Letter to Steve Jobs
update 16:00: Steve Jobs answers to my open letter, see below. — Dear Steve Jobs, — Having read your Thoughts on Flash, I could not agree with you more. Flash is not the Web, and I am glad Apple seizes the opportunity of open standards to build better products for their customers.
Context & Ripple Effects
By late April 2010, Steve Jobs had turned unmediated replies into a habit: he was answering customer email bluntly ("Are You Nuts?"), demoing the iPad to the Wall Street Journal himself (February's WSJ demo), and John Battelle had already published an open letter pressing Apple on its refusal to converse with its peers and community. When Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" declaring Apple would never allow Flash on its platforms, blogger Hugo responded the next day with an open letter of agreement — and got a personal reply from Jobs within hours.
What makes this exchange notable is how quickly the argument spread beyond the two parties: Clicker ran a fact-check of "Thoughts on Flash," and NewTeeVee read the letter as Apple gunning for open source codecs rather than merely rejecting Adobe. The feud is now being litigated in public letters, fact-checks, and codec speculation instead of product announcements.
First-order effects
- Hugo's endorsement hands Jobs a ready-made third-party validation of the "Flash is not the Web" position, and Jobs' same-day reply converts a lone blogger's post into part of Apple's official Flash narrative.
- Adobe is left fighting a two-front public argument — Jobs' own letter plus a stream of sympathetic endorsements like this one — while outlets such as Clicker subject Apple's claims to line-by-line scrutiny.
Second-order effects
- NewTeeVee's reading that Apple is "gunning for open source codecs" signals where pressure lands next: video publishers and toolmakers are pushed to evaluate H.264/HTML5 paths rather than wait for a Flash détente.
- Other developers and writers learn that open letters addressed to Jobs can extract same-day replies, encouraging more direct appeals to Apple over the heads of its communications staff — exactly the pattern Battelle's earlier letter protested.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners keep settling technology disputes through personal manifestos rather than standards bodies or joint statements, web-format decisions shift toward whoever controls the dominant device — with open-standards language serving as both shield and weapon.
- The Apple–Adobe clash, already described in coverage as a public vendetta, points toward a structural split in the content ecosystem between plugin-era incumbents and native/open-standards stacks, forcing every publisher and tools vendor to pick a side.
The trend: Platform owners are increasingly deciding which web technologies live or die through direct public manifestos, with "open standards" replacing compatibility as the stated criterion for what runs on their devices.