In an interview with Wall Street Journal, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen responded to Steve Jobs’s open letter “Thoughts on Flash” that was published today morning. Mr. Narayen said the technology problems that Jobs mentioned in his letter are “really a smokescreen” to hide Apple’s real goals. He added, “When you resort to licensing language to restrict this sort of development it has nothing to do with technology.”
Narayen said that Apple’s restrictions would make it cumbersome for developers to make products that work on many devices. He responded to decrease in battery life claims by calling them “patently false” and blamed Mac system crashes due to Flash on Apple’s operating system rather then on Adobe’s Flash.
When asked about Jobs’ comments on Adobe being a closed platform, Narayen went for a politically correct answer “I find it amusing, honestly. Flash is an open specification.” Rather than the true answer that Flash is a proprietary closed system. Even iPhone OS is an open specification, you can get all the information about iPhone OS online. However, on both iPhone platform and Flash, developers have to agree with licensing terms before they can use the software from the two companies. We have added video of the interview below.