The original post by Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash”, http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I was reading HTML5′s pros and cons the other day, and that reminded me of Steve Jobs. Jobs talked about Apple’s relationship with Adobe, and he also talked about his/Apple’s decision on Flash. That is, Apple is not going to support Flash in any of their products. Instead, Apple’s going to prompt open technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript. The above is the very high-level summary of Jobs’s “Thoughts on Flash”.

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First, there’s “Open”.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

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I completely agree with Mr. Jobs. Although there are a lot of debates on Openness vs Closeness,  I have been always a big fan of open-source software and companies. I have never really forced myself to learn any Flash-related technologies. It’s not because I was lazy to learn it, but I thought there was never really a  need to learn it, that’s all. I always avoid using Flash in my webapps, even websites although Flash is highly demanded by most of customers. I don’t blame them. What I did is I told them the same effect or maybe a better effect can be done by not using Flash. And they were all OK with that. What does that tell us? It’s not Flash that customers need, but the final effect.

To be continued…