Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife

“Holier-than-thou, an adjective, meaning “marked by an air of
superior piety or morality”. Everybody has moments in their life
where they get into a “holier-than-thou” attitude, and I think
Steve Jobs’ open letter regarding Adobe, and Flash in particular,
really fits the bill. There are three specific points I want to
address to illustrate just how holier-than-thou, hypocritical, and
misleading this letter really is.

“Jobs’ letter contains a lot of good points. Flash is indeed a
very problematic piece of software; its performance is terrible
(although 10.1 improves this), it’s riddled with security issues,
and it’s highly unstable. It crashes a lot, eats CPU, and to boot,
opens up your machine to all sorts of security nastiness. To make
matters worse, it’s proprietary and not a web standard in the true
sense of the word.

“That being said, Jobs’ letter is incredibly two-faced,
hypocritical, and very misleading. It’s clearly a marketing trick
to pull the wool over the eyes of consumers, and while that’s okay
(they’re in it to make money, after all), it’s our job to remove
that wool from our eyes. Just as we geeks immediately understand
Microsoft’s ulterior motive in licensing patents to Linux/Android
vendors, we should not just accept Jobs’ words either.

“There are three points I wish to address specifically to
illustrate just how hypercritical the letter is: Carbon, H264, and
iTunes on Windows (or iTunes’ non-existence on Linux). The order is
entirely random, and there’s no deeper meaning behind it.”

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