Read Paragraphs 1 and 2 from the provided link, starting with "Apple has a long relationship" and ending with "Let me explain".

COMMENT on above:
Why or how has Adobe and Apple grown apart? Keep this in mind as you read forward. First Apple says they started out together pioneering desktop publishing. At the end of this paragraph he says that Mac user's (all of them?) buy around half of Adobe's Creative Suite products, not just desktop publishing. It seems like if all of Mac users buy half of all of the Adobe create products, then that would signify growth, so why does Steve jobs imagine that the two companies are growing apart?

Read paragraphs 3 and 4 from the provided link, starting with "First There's open" and ending with "Flash is a closed system".

COMMENT on above:
Steve Jobs is wrong or playing word games. Check out flex.org and know that Steve Jobs is wrong. Flash player is controlled by Adobe. This is without question. But the flex framework and SDK comes with a compiler, debugger and hundreds of out-of-the-box components all for free (thanks Adobe!) and people can contribute to the code base by adding components and providing feedback and enhancements. Flex apps compile into SWFs that run in the Adobe Flash player. Beyond that, the SWF file format has also been opened. This means that people can create their own compilers and put those compilers into their own products. There are a number of additional open-source projects / products that take advantage of both the free Flex SDK and the very open SWF format. Steve Jobs would be correct in assuming that adobe isn't going to open-source the Flash Professional IDE (that is Adobe's special tool for building SWF files). But then again, since SWF file format is open, I could go build the next Adobe Flash Professional if I wanted to using Adobe's open SWF file format. The bottom line is that adobe owns the Flash player and will decide what it can or cannot do, just the same way the iPhone is owned by Apple and they will decide what it can or cannot do. Apple can't call Adobe evil for doing exactly what Apple does (the only difference being, Adobe doesn't hamstring your development or put a gag-rule on developers... talk about closed). ActionScript 3 as a language was also added to a current open-source project in partnership with Mozilla (a leader in open-source) called Taramin where ActionScript 3 could be used on the client side in place of JavaScript.

Read paragraph 5 from the provided link, starting with "Apple has many proprietary products" and ending with "Apple is a member".

COMMENT on above:
Apple is happy and proud to claim that H.264 standard for video is open while their deathgrip around the quicktime player is no more closed than Adobe's grip around the Flash player. Apple forces their users to experience web video using their implementation of video as it relates to QuickTime as the player of choice (or in the case of Apple's users, quicktime player is the ONLY choice, making it not a choice at all). As for low powered, if you own an iPhone you might disagree. I can't go an entire weekend without needing to power-up the phone again. And HTML5 so far has benchmarked horribly for performance. Check out this HTML5 versus Flash performance video to compare the reality of Flash performance versus HTML5 performance.

Read paragraph 6 from the provided link, starting with "Apple even creates open standards" and ending with "the standard for mobile web browsers".

COMMENT on above:
WebKit is owned by Apple and it is open... BUT the core of WebKit came from a partnership between the Linux community and Apple many, many years ago. The KDE project pioneered the thin lightweight open standard browser and JavaScript engine and Apple wanted to join the project in 1998. In an attempt to join they submitted a ton of augmentations to what was then named KHTML and many of those changes were either undocumented, poorly documented or Apple operating system specific. But wait, it gets worse: Apple wanted to demand that the open-source KHTML project require that all developers sign a non-disclosure agreement (hello gag-rule... AGAIN) if they were going to look at the Apple contributed code. This ran completely against the goals of being open source and the KDE project contributors rejected Apples approach. Apple then split off into its own proprietary closed development effort until 2005 when it decided (after having complete control of it and Apple Safari was so far behind in the browser war it was itself a moot point) to make their version of KHTML named WebKit open-source. The open-source community is always in favor of collaboration and they will welcome it even from notoriously closed shops like Apple. But just because they welcome collaboration, it doesn't justify the rest of the broken relationship dealings made that way by Apple. You can read more about the history of WebKit at wikipedia.

Read paragraphs 7, 8 and 9, starting with "Second, there’s the “full web”" and ending with "any other platform in the world".

COMMENT on above:
Apple doesn't address this issue very well at all. They are basically saying that "hey, you can see a lot of video on the web," but that doesn't explain away how much video you are missing. And speaking of missing, you are also not hearing about all of the sites you will be missing out on that implement flash because Apple doesn't address the fact that Flash is much more than games or video. Go check out the FWA web site to be dazzled by all of the sites that depend on flash to do cool marketing or provierish dashboards of information or that allow you to experience cool features like Mini's car configurator. It is also worth mentioning that by the Apple app standard (meaning a micro-sized application mostly of the realm of entertainment) sites like kongregate have an inventory of free games equal to 1/3 of the entire iTunes iPhone App Store. To claim they are the largest anything, let alone games or entertainment platform, is ridiculous.

Read paragraphs 10 and 11, starting with "Third, there’s reliability" and ending with "by adding Flash".

COMMENT on above:
This is pretty misleading. Symantec recently released a list of most attacked. The number one most attacked asset on the web was IE. This implies that IE had the most vulnerabilities, but the implication is wrong. IE had 45 reported vulnerabilities. If you are like me, you maybe use the Firefox browser the most. Do you? I prefer it. But in reality, 2009 saw 169 Firefox browser vulnerabilities. So vulnerability doesn't necessarily positively correlate with security attacks. So how many security vulnerabilities did Flash see in 2009? 23! Does that seem like a lot? Apple would have us believe it is too vulnerable to put it on their precious iPhone, right!? And how many actual security vulnerabilities in the Safari browser in 2009? 94!!!! Steve Jobs, shame on you for blatantly spinning the facts! You can read all about 2009 security vulnerabilities on cnet news.

Read paragraph 12, starting with "In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices" and ending with "Who knows how it will perform?".

COMMENT on above:
Flash lite has been on devices since 2003. Nokia, one of the world's leading phone manufacturer has been a part of that initiative since the beginning of Flash Lite. It was its own initiative, implementing a XML-like interface design paradigm along with (later) and implementation of ActionScript 2 code development. When Steve Jobs claims that they have asked Adobe to show Flash running well on any mobile device, I am not sure what they consider "well performing" but here is an example from 2 years ago demonstrating Flash Lite and Flash Media Server live streaming video on a Nokia. Can the iPhone play streaming live video? I own an iPhone but I am pretty certain that iPhone still can't stream video (just progressively download videos to QuickTime). In fact, they only recently requested that a standard for HTML5 video streaming be added to the HTML5 specification (said another way, currently HTML5 doesn't include any specification for streaming video... only progressively downloading video... hello!?) And on the question of "Who knows how it will perform?" I think Google knows. In fact I think all of the companies in the Open Screen Project knows, because Adobe isn't keeping any secrets. Apple doesn't need to hold its breath. Apple needs to get out of its ivory tower and play well with others, and then they "will know."

Read paragraphs 13 and 14, starting with "Fourth, there’s battery life" and ending with "Netflix and many other companies".

COMMENT on above:
I know for a fact that Adobe has been working with hardware vendors to increase the hardware-based acceleration of it's products. Check out The Open Screen Project and the business partnerships involved to get an idea of who is willing to work with Adobe to ensure that Flash can make as much use of the hardware as is possible. There have been blogs where Adobe folks have mentioned the fact that they have asked for more support from Apple with regard to gaining more access to enable hardware excelleration, but Apple (like their relationship on the KHTML project mentioned above) wants it their way, apparently, or not at all.

Read paragraph 15, starting with "Although Flash has recently added support for H.264" and ending with "battery is fully drained".

COMMENT on above:
Adobe's F4V format has been out since 2008. You can read the praises of Flash F4V which implements H.264 proving that Steve Jobs is lying about Flash only recently adding support for the H.264 codec. The real point here is that if I want to watch a video only available in FLV and not a H.264 format, then soon I will have to use any mobile device other than the iPhone or iPad. On those devices I can experience other formats. As well, those non-iPhone devices can benefit from the fact that FLV can handle integrated cue points and full screen video (two things HTML5 and HTML5 embedded video cannot do natively). This is the sort of thing that is meant by "the full web" that Steve Jobs has left out of his letter. But that is essentially the Steve Jobs iPhone and iPad trick, isn't it? If they simply don't tell you what you are missing then in the end, like AOL a decade ago, you think you are experiencing "the web" when in reality you are only experiencing what Apple wants to support in their devices.

Read paragraphs 16, 17, 18 and 19, starting with "When websites re-encode their videos" and ending with "support touch-based devices".

COMMENT on above:
This is horrible reasoning. The fact is that I can currently today write a website using HTML4 + CSS + JavaScript that relies on "rollovers." To pretend that this is exclusively a Flash problem is again intentionally misleading.

Read paragraphs 20 and 21, starting with "Sixth, the most important reason" and ending with "on our mobile devices".

COMMENT on above:
Steve claims here that Flash doesn't support touch based devices. This is again a lie (why lie Steve Jobs? Why?). Flash CS5 (available for sale now) comes with a series of touch-based events that are made to support all of the touch capabilities of the iPhone and iPad but additional touch features not available on any Apple device but included in Windows 7 (note: Microsoft has been working on touch for much longer than the iPhone has been around). If you own any number of HP or Dell laptops or HP desktop computers which implement touch under Windows 7, then you can see how well flash performs in those environments. Check out this video demonstration of a cross-platform game created with touch in mind running equally well on a number of devices. It is also worth noting that entire 3rd party companies have already enhanced the Flash touch libraries to provide even more gesture events (anyone could equally extend the Flash events, but this company just shortcuts it for you!) Finally, here is an excellent demonstration of Flash running on larger touch screen computers if the first video didn't put a nail in Steve Jobs coffin on this issue!

Read paragraphs 22 through 24, starting with "We know from painful experience" and ending with "to fully adopt Mac OS X".

COMMENT on above:
This is a great issue here. People love good apps. They just do. if someone writes something well, then they like the app and want it to work on whatever device they work from. I was a PC user for years and I still use a PC at work. At home I work on a Macbook Pro and an iMac. I don't really want to have my applications completely change when I move from one platform to another. This is likely the reason why Apple didn't create a Window's centric interface when they ported iTunes over to the Microsoft platform. People knew what to expect from iTunes on the Mac. To change the way it works on another platform would simply segment both their development and experience of the tool. Applying this same standard to their software, iTunes should be considered a categorical failure.... but of course it is not. It is just blind prejudice. People don't care what language you code the software in. If the app works and people are happy with it, then they won't care for a minute that you wrote it using 3rd party APIs or layers of technology. Some geek out there might say, "Oh, I WILL KNOW!!!" But that same geek likely had no idea that since Mac OSX, they've been running Free BSD (Linux) with an Apple interface and imagining all of the stability of their computer was a Steve Jobs innovation too. So is cross-platform as bad for the iPhone as Steve is describing. Apparently, it is not if you consider the fact that since the iPhone OS 4 announcement the 3rd Party tool AppCelerator Titanium has gotten 50 apps though the iTunes App Store in the last 3 weeks even though their apps are basically built the same way that Flash for iPhone native apps are built. You can read more about AppCelerator Titanium on their web site.

Read paragraph 25 starting with "Our motivation is simple" and ending with "on any platform".

COMMENT on above:
He is clearly admitting the goals here. I don't know why Steve Jobs didn't just say this paragraph and ignore the rest of what he blathered on about. "We want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen." Fair enough. Just be honest. This is your plan. "Use our software, not theirs!" Why doesn't he just say this? because he has to convince you that when he kills innovation, it is for your good, when in reality, it is simply so he can (as he admit here) (1) sell more devices, have the best apps, and feed his ecosystem of more devices and bigger audiences!

Read paragraphs 26 and 27, starting with "Conclusions" and ending with "Flash falls short".

COMMENT on above:
Wrong again Steve jobs. Flash was originally a vector animation drawing software targeted for pen tablet devices back in 1996. The big focus on mobile now is a return to its roots.

Read paragraphs 28 and 29, starting with "The avalanche of media outlets" and ending with "leaving the past behind".

COMMENT on above:
Finally, wrong yet again Steve Jobs. Dreamwever CS5 can develop apps for HTML5 using the Canvas tag. Some of the lightweight animation stuff that HTML5 can do today has been incorporated into their products. But what Apple seems to keep missing is that Adobe and its mobile competition do not feel that HTML5 needs to be pitted against Flash in the market place. Apple's competition feels that "Yes! You can have the full web!" Plugins are not some obscure non-standards-based tangent to be rejected out of hand. Plugins have a rich history with the web and are not going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, Google is actively leading the charge to further integrate plugins more natively within their WebKit-based browser, while Firefox continues to integrate with Adobe innovations under the Tamarin Project which allows people to write client-side code in ActionScript 3 rather than in JavaScript under the Mozilla / Gecko based browsers.