Adobe’s answers to Apple with ad campaign

An open let­ter from Adobe’s founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock titled “Our thoughts on open mar­kets” is tar­get­ing Apple. Seems Steve Jobs’ recent let­ter spurred an even more vivid reac­tion from Adobe. Adobe’s founders let­ter is part of a “Freedom of Choice” cam­paign (in Washington Post, Ars Technica, Engadget, and The New York Times.) to counter the pub­lic opin­ion on the “no-flash on iPhone OS” dispute.

«No com­pany — no mat­ter how big or how cre­at­ive — should dic­tate what you can cre­ate, how you cre­ate it, or what you can exper­i­ence on the web.»

«More recently, we’ve done the same thing with Adobe® Flash® tech­no­logy. We pub­lish the spe­cific­a­tions for Flash — mean­ing any­one can make their own Flash player.»

Two issues come to mind:

1 — Apple dic­tates what it wants for its own plat­form. It doesn’t tell you “have” to cre­ate some­thing for their mobile plat­form. They don’t have a mono­poly in the smart­phone busi­ness — there are more plat­form choices — Android, Palm OS, Symbian, Windows Mobile (and later this year Windows Phone 7). In none of them Flash works very well. Note: Apple doesn’t have restric­tions for Flash on their com­puters or desktop browser and iPhone OS is not the web. Note 2: Was free­dom of choice what Adobe was think­ing when bought Macromedia and their tools portfolio?

2 — Adobe is com­plain­ing Apple doesn’t allow Flash cre­ation tools to develop iPhone OS applic­a­tions. Adobe is say­ing they allow 3rd-party Flash play­ers but it’s not say­ing any­thing about how there are no real, viable 3rd-party tools to develop Flash applications/content. Humm…

It’s inter­est­ing there’s a rumor going that Adobe thinks this is a legal issue and may be behind the com­plains made to the FTC regard­ing pos­sible anti­trust violations.