After a big public announcement Apple had for the iPad, CEO Steve Jobs took time in the day afterwards to have a Town Hall at One Infinite Loop, making himself available for questions from employees bold enough to stand up and take one right between the eyes.
This time, the big topics included Google and Adobe — no surprises there. Google recently unveiled its own Android-powered handset, the Nexus One, whose release prompted Jobs to perhaps over-react by announcing on the same day, that the iTunes store had served up three billion apps and that “… we see no signs of the competition catching up any time soon.” Apple’s billionth iPhone app download was greeted with great fanfare, but the two billionth not so much, so it felt a tad like Jobs was feeling some heat.
And the absence of Adobe Flash support on the iPhone for three years and counting, and now on the iPad, is either celebrated by users as a poke in the eye of one of the web’s most dextrous tools, or the most over-rated and overused crutch for decent design.
Jobs, characteristically, did not mince words as he spoke to the assembled, according to a person who was there who could not be named because this person is not authorized by Apple to speak with the press.
On Google: "We did not enter the search business", Jobs said. "They entered the phone business. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them", he said. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. "I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing", he says. "This don’t be evil mantra: It’s bullshit".
About Adobe: "They are lazy", Jobs says. "They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy", he says. "Whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash", he says. The world is moving to HTML5.
The world, of course, includes Google, which last week in a somewhat more modest development bypassed Apple’s iPhone app blockade by unveiling an html5 version of Google Voice, which takes full advantage of mobile Safari on the iPhone. Wired.com found it to be an impressive variation of the app Apple has neither approved nor officially rejected.
And it is, of course, in keeping with Google’s stated view (Android app marketplace notwithstanding) that the future is really in web-based applications and not in mobile apps at all. Web-based applications of the sort html5 makes much more viable.
So, great work rallying the troops, Steve — but be careful what you wish for.
