How Steve Jobs Actually Prolonged the Life Of Mobile Flash and Delayed its Death

By: Hillel Fuld

Just in case you have been hiding out for the past 24 hours, Adobe has officially announced that it is killing off the Mobile Flash plugin. This is big news for the world of mobile and the inevitable victory of HTML5. I am not belittling that.

The jerk reaction of pretty much everyone, including me, was that Steve Jobs killed Flash. That is understandable. Jobs, in his early days, pitched Adobe to create its famous application suite including software like Photoshop and Illustrator for the Macintosh. It was a clear and natural partnership since the Mac back then and today, was very popular among designers. Unfortunately for Jobs, Adobe, and iOS consumers for the next decade, Adobe declined on the grounds that the Mac was not popular enough for them to invest resources in its support.

For the rest of Jobs’ career, he fought a personal battle, which he disguised with a technological one, to keep Flash off of iOS devices. Jobs even did something very out of character and wrote a post about the whole Adobe and iOS war. You can read that here.

Of course, Jobs did not ban Flash from Mac OS, just iOS, that would have been pretty dumb given the dominance of Flash on the internet, and Jobs was many things, but dumb he was not.

In an interesting turn of events, a month or so after Jobs passes away, Adobe announces the complete cease of Flash development and the transition over to HTML5. You have to wonder about the timing on both the part of Adobe and Jobs’ effect on this decision. And so, it seems the consensus on the Web is that Jobs is single handedly responsible for the death of this amazing technology that would have otherwise flourished.

Here is what I think. Whoever says that Jobs killed Flash is guilty of what Jobs himself was well known for, viewing the world in a binary and simplistic fashion. Yes, Jobs was a big opposer of Flash, but the technology died because every time I watch Flash content on my Macbook Air, the device begins to sound like a 747 that is about to take off. Flash makes it go nuts. The same is true for my PC, the same is true for my Playbook, and the same is true for my Android tablet.

OK, so Jobs contributed to the death of mobile Flash, but he actually contributed more to its long life. How in the world did I reach that conclusion? Good question, I thought you’d never ask.

Here is the thing with the mobile space. Like it or not, Apple revolutionized it. Capacitive touch technology, multitouch, apps, digital content, and the list goes on. Except it didn’t take long before all those technologies were widely adopted by Apple’s competition including Android, Nokia, BlackBerry, and others. But if they were all just copying Apple, how were they going to differentiate themselves?

Well, Android had the open thing going for them and lord knows, they tried to market that. But do consumers really care about open source code? Yea, not so much. So, there was this one thing that Apple was adamant about and that could give Google, RIM, and others a real differentiating factor against their dominant competitor, Apple.

I see the conversation at Google going something like this. “Hey, here is an idea to stand out from Apple, mobile Flash”. “But if we allow our devices to run Flash, that means more crashes, worse battery, devices that heat  up, and other issues”. “Yes, true, but it will show Apple!” “OK, let’s do it!”. Yes, yes, I am oversimplifying, but the bottom line is, anyone who has used Flash on a mobile device can tell you, it is a lot less fun than the Android or Playbook ads make it seem.

I do think Jobs’ prolonged battle against Flash caused the company irreversible PR damage, but the bottom line is, had it not been for Jobs’ absolute opposition to Mobile Flash, there is a very good chance other major mobile players would not have embraced this faulty technology with such open arms.

Before I hit Publish and get called all sorts of fun names for writing this post, allow me to leave you with one question. If Jobs single handedly brought about the death of mobile Flash, an otherwise solid and dependable technology, then why is Adobe killing off Flash on TVs and some say Flash in browsers as well? Did Jobs do that too?

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