Adobe Co-Founder: We Never Abandoned Apple, but Apple Is Abandoning Us
A couple of weeks ago, Apple CEO Steve Jobs published “Thoughts on Flash,” a 1,671-word execration of Adobe's Flash platform. — On Thursday, Adobe co-founders and co-chairmen Chuck Geschke and John Warnock followed suit with some thoughts of their own.
Context & Ripple Effects
The dispute followed Steve Jobs’s public case against Flash on April 29, which drew rebuttals from Adobe’s CEO and former engineers. Adobe then paired its technical defense with a targeted advertising campaign and founders’ open letter, turning a product-standard argument into a public confrontation between longtime partners.
The disagreement centers on competing accounts of web video’s direction: Adobe says Flash serves most web video, while Jobs argues H.264 and HTML5 already cover most of it. That makes the founders’ response material to developers and publishers choosing which technologies to support.
First-order effects
- Adobe’s co-founders reinforce the company’s public defense of Flash and its claim that Apple—not Adobe—has broken with the prior relationship.
- Apple’s anti-Flash position receives a direct, high-profile rebuttal as the dispute moves beyond Jobs’s original technical critique.
Second-order effects
- Web-video publishers and developers face a more explicit compatibility choice between Flash and the H.264/HTML5 path Apple endorses, increasing the value of formats that reach Apple devices without Flash.
- Adobe’s advertising and open-letter campaign raises the commercial stakes for Apple: Flash support becomes a visible point of differentiation rather than a quiet implementation decision.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners can steer developers toward preferred web technologies, software vendors such as Adobe will have to compete not only on product capability but also on access to major device ecosystems.
- The Flash dispute is an early test of whether open web standards or a platform owner’s supported stack sets the terms for web-media distribution.
The trend: Device-platform control is becoming a force in web-technology adoption, with Apple and Adobe contesting which video stack developers should treat as essential.