Warm And Fuzzy Adobe Shrugs Off Apple's Barbs

Adobe has launched an advertising campaign aimed at counteracting Apple's acerbic criticisms of Flash. But unlike Apple, Adobe is preaching a message of benevolence and interoperability.

In one advertisement, Adobe professes its love for Apple, as well as Flash, HTML, all devices, and all platforms. "What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web," the advertisement reads.

In an open letter published this week in a number of print and Web news outlets, Adobe co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock emphasized the role that openness has played in the company's evolution.

Adobe published the specifications for earlier innovations like PostScript and PDF, as well as newer ones like Flash. This openness exposed Adobe to more competition, but innovation helped keep Adobe ahead of the pack, according to Geschke and Warnock.

"We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web -- the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time," the Adobe co-founders said in the letter.

Adobe wants to dispel what it says are misconceptions that have arisen as a result of its dust-up with Apple over Flash. In a Web page entitled "The Truth About Flash", Adobe notes that "Flash has full support for working on touch-based devices."

Adobe also says 75 percent of all video on the Web is viewed through the Flash player, including H.264 and VP6 video. Adobe also claims that Flash "performs as well as, if not better than, comparable multimedia technologies".

Adobe's conciliatory tone is a marked shift from last month, when CEO Shantanu Narayen called Apple's criticisms of Flash a "smoke screen" designed to conceal its desire to maintain total control over iPhone software development. "It's clear that it has nothing to do with technology," Narayen told The Wall Street Journal last month.

Adobe was furious when Apple changed the terms of its iPhone 4.0 beta SDK licensing agreement last month to prohibit an iPhone cross-compiler in Flash Professional CS5 just as Adobe was preparing to launch the product. Adobe subsequently filed a Form 10-Q with the SEC suggesting that its business could be damaged by Apple's decision to block Flash, and the company been rumored to be considering suing Apple.

Now, it seems that Adobe has changed its strategy and will now let the industry decide which side has the stronger argument.

"In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody -- and everybody, but certainly not a single company," Geschke and Warnock said in their letter.