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Steve Jobs' Wall Street Journal Visit Reportedly Included Arguments Against Flash

Thursday February 18, 2010 10:51 am PST by Eric Slivka
Building on comments reportedly made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at a town hall meeting for company employees last month, Valleywag claims that Jobs focused a significant amount of effort during his recent visit to The Wall Street Journal on selling newspaper executives on the need to move away from Adobe Flash for digital content.

Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy.

But he also called Flash a "CPU hog," a source of "security holes" and, in perhaps the most grevious insult an famous innovator can utter, a dying technology. Jobs said of Flash, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology."

According to the report, Jobs then shared a list of technologies such as floppy drives, data port standards, and CCFL-backlit LCDs that Apple had helped computer users abandon in favor of newer technologies.

In his arguments against Flash, Jobs reportedly claimed that including Flash support would have decimated the iPad's battery life, bringing it down from its claimed 10 hours to the neighborhood of 1.5 hours. Jobs also claimed that abandoning Flash in favor of other tools would be "trivial" for The Wall Street Journal, suggesting that they embrace H.264-encoded video has one means toward that end. He apparently did not address, however, the steps that would be required for the paper to entirely redo its entire Web-based content in iPad-friendly technologies such as JavaScript.

Just yesterday, Adobe Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch defended Flash's reputation on the Mac and noted that increasing numbers of smartphone operating are supporting the standard. Based on his comments, Lynch appears to remain hopeful that the adoption of Flash for mobile platforms will convince holdouts like Apple that it can be supported.

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