Considering the scathing nature of Steve Job’s open letter about Flash Player and Adobe, we’re not surprised to hear that Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, has made some official comments in reply. Courtesy of an interview the man just had with The Wall Street Journal, we’ve got some pretty interesting remarks as to what Jobs said earlier this morning. In the end though, it’s nothing we haven’t heard before, but that doesn’t make it any less obvious that the two companies are indeed butting heads.
When it comes to the open letter itself, Narayen suggests that it’s nothing more than a “smokescreen,” apparently designed to confuse the industry about what’s really happening here. And no, Narayen doesn’t do anything to clear up the situation on his end, either. He openly rebuttals the idea that Flash isn’t open, calling his platform an “open specification.” Perhaps a bit more straight forward though, Adobe’s CEO said that Job’s claims about Flash negatively affecting battery life are “patently false,” and actually suggested that, actually, it’s more of an OS X issue, rather than a Flash-based problem.
Near the end, Narayen pointed out that Adobe is a system for devs to create multiplatform tools, easier. And, yes, that’s the core argument here. These two companies can argue the differences between system performance until their blue in the face, and we imagine that everyone will want to join in, but the real issue here is the development process. Ultimately, will Flash make an impact with Froyo, the next version of Android? Or will Flash on mobile devices still just be a pain, rather than something we look forward to? That’s the only way for Adobe to argue the points listed by Jobs.