RANT: Chuck Geschke & John Warnock love Apple, Steve Jobs loves Legos?

Ok folks, I admit it.  I am a bit confused by all the big hub bub and babble around Apple and Adobe and the fact iPhone's and iPad's do not support Flash.  I even once found myself irritated about it but honestly it was quick to get over when I realized the number of sites I visit on a regular basis that have flash are so few and far between it was irrelevant.

Late last night I stumbled upon some interesting efforts by both Adobe and Apple and of course then a snark response by John Q. Public.  From CNN's Connect the World Blog:

"Dozens of newspapers and tech websites around the world had large spread advertisements from tech giant Adobe, saying that they "love Apple", despite being locked in a bitter dispute with the company.

Does the battle between Adobe and Apple impact you?

Ads appeared in publications including the "Wall Street Journal" and "Financial Times" and was a play on words of the popular slogan "I love New York" - but instead this time it read "We love Apple". . ." [+]

Ok so Adobe is taking what I will call the "loving kindness" approach, also known as sickeningly sweet approach of kissing Apple's ass, but if we head over to their website we see that what they really love is choice.  Adobe is to a degree right: I was a PC user my entire life (until 3 years ago when I became an Apple Junkie) and it is my choice what I buy and install and use on my computer.  To some degree the same is said of my MacBook Pro.  I make the choices, I pay for the software, I download, install and use it.  But not with my iPhone or iPad.

So what's the deal?  Apple says (for lack of fancy wording) it is protecting us from the evil of exploits and mishaps in the Flash world, but as the owner of a tech company (btw we just celebrated our 17th anniversary in early May) if I hear from one more nonprofit that they want a Flash this or Flash that I may jump out a window.  Flash is, in fact prevalent on the web.  If you visit our home page it even looks like we use it, but look again, visit our site on your iPhone or iPad... it's not flash, it's XML that mimics a SWF file.  Now in my spare time I will write a script that sniffs out that device and displays a static image instead of showing you nothing or the horrible lego.

BTW Steve, what the heck is up with the little blue lego?  It is not even a logical user friendly icon.  I remember first seeing it a few years back when we early adopted first gen iPhones and well... come on Steve, you could have at least gone with a retro fitted fitted "image not found" from like 1990.

Enter John Q. Public (AKA: @isaaco) who takes a quick Photoshop reply of his/her own.  Though I have to admit now, that most of the people who saw this on the web at Boing Boing (myself included) don't really have any idea what it means:

I guess in a very Zen and liberal thinking way we have:

We LEGO Adobe where LEGO is "let go". You know like "Leggo my Eggo?"

Yeah, I am not so sure myself and I am not sure what will happen.  Millions and millions of iPhones sold.  iPads flying off the shelf.  Why would Jobs cooperate with Adobe?  Then again, Adobe is not exactly doing much for the world or community or web society as a whole.  Sure Adobe sells their software at a discount through Tech Soup, but folks, I have to tell you I have been using Photoshop since version 1.0 and if you were to think of something like Photoshop as an online software or product, it has been unstable since version 4.  In all it's years Adobe released Adobe Photoshop 1.0, Adobe Photoshop 2.0, Adobe Photoshop 3.0, and then 4.0.  This was over the course of many years.  Then one night someone at Adobe realized they could start reconfiguring the application, splicing parts of Illustrator here, swing in some Acrobat there and in the span of less than 2 years we saw: Adobe Photoshop 5, 5.5, 6.0, 7.0 and then they stopped using numbers and we have CS, CS 1, CS 2, CS 3, CS 4 and now CS 5.  Folks is the software getting any better?  Anyway, that is a rant for another day.

So I am not sure what will happen with the whole Apple/Adobe debacle.  It is kind of scary when two of the industry leaders go head to head but they both have their points and there is not much we as the consumers can do about it except sit back and watch.

Oh happy day,
Jordan Dossett, Digital Trouble Maker & Founder

Posted by Jordan Dossett on May 15, 2010 at 09:30 pm EST

Copyright © Antharia. All rights reserved.
No part of this blog may be reproduced without prior written permission.