In a recent meeting with officials from The Wall Street Journal to pitch the Apple iPad, Steve Jobs allegedly and unsurprisingly had harsh words for Adobe Flash, calling it "old technology."
According to Valleywag, Jobs met with officials from the newspaper weeks ago to talk to them about the possibility of bringing the Journal to the iPad. When Jobs demonstrated the device, editors allegedly asked about the iPad's lack of support for Adobe Flash.
Much of what the Apple co-founder allegedly said is similar to what was attributed to him from a recent company town hall meeting: Flash is a "CPU hog" that is full of "security holes." He also reportedly said, "We don't spend a lot of energy on old technology."
Jobs is then rumored to have gone on to compare Flash to a number of now-defunct technologies that Apple abandoned, including floppy drives, old data ports (including FireWire 400), and even the CD, replaced by the iPod and iTunes. He also allegedly said including Flash support would reduce the iPad's battery life from 10 hours to just 1.5 hours.
The multi-billionaire reportedly suggested that the newspaper abandon Flash -- a "trivial" move -- and embrace an alternative, like the H.264 codec.
During that same meeting, Journal editor Alan Murray posted to Twitter from an iPad Jobs brought with him. That incident reportedly upset Jobs, who allegedly had the editor delete the post after he was said to be "furious."
In an e-mail to Gawker, Murray reportedly said: "I will say that Apple's general paranoia about news coverage is truly extraordinary— but that's not telling you anything you didn't already know."
Apple and Adobe have had a high-profile dispute over the use of Flash on the Web since the iPhone debuted in 2007 without support for the Web format. Apple has famously shunned Flash, with the Web plugin having no support in the iPhone or iPod touch Safari browser.
This week, Adobe's CTO defended his company against comments attributed to Jobs from the town hall meeting. Kevin Lynch acknowledged that Mac users have had issues with Flash, and that the Mac version does not work as well as its PC counterpart, but he said the company is working to address the concerns of users.
"We're totally open to hearing feedback like that," Lynch said. "And that's one of the really important things to do in a situation like this, when people are complaining about something -- not going into internal mode, or whatever, (but) really listening to what people are saying. We do that with our customers, we do that with our critics, and often there are kernels in there that we ought to do something about, and so we are."
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