Steve Jobs unloaded on Flash during a meeting with Wall Street Journal executives last week, according to Gawker.
Jobs met with editors of the Journal to show them the new iPad. The Journal make widespread use of Flash on its website for video, infographics, etc., and editors raised concerns about the absence of Adobe’s plug-in.
According to Gawker: “Jobs was brazen in his dismissal of Flash, people familiar with the meeting tell us. He repeated what he said at an Apple Town Hall recently, that Flash crashes Macs and is buggy.”
Jobs then proceeded to eviscerate the technology:
- He called Flash a “CPU hog.”
- A source of “security holes.”
- A dying technology. Jobs reportedly compared Flash to floppy drives, legacy ports and even the CD. “We don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology,” Jobs reportedly said.
- The iPad’s battery performance would be degraded from 10 hours to 1.5 hours if it had to spend its CPU cycles decoding Flash,” Jobs supposedly said.
- Ditching Flash would be “trivial,” Jobs told Journal editors.
Gawker says it’s not clear how the Journal’s staff reacted to the meeting, but notes that less than a week later, the paper’s op-ed section said Apple is the new Microsoft and is obsessed with “zero-sum maneuvering.” It’s primary example? Jobs’ decision to keep Flash off the iPad.
What Steve Jobs Said During His Wall Street Journal iPad Demo
