Flashpoint

As you probably heard, Apple announced the iPad last week. As you could probably imagine, many people on the internet had opinions about it. Most were inane.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the whole pageant was Steve Jobs's blatant middle finger to Adobe. He fully articulated the official party line at a recent Town Hall:

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.

My own anecdotal evidence corroborates Jobs's accusations - I would say 95% of my computer woes involve Flash - but I couldn't help but wonder if I was simply buying into Apple's justification for marginalizing a competitor to its own economic ecosystem.

Daring Fireball has an excellent response to my musings.