Earlier this week, a report out of Australia said that Apple along with Microsoft and Adobe had been asked by Australia’s House of Representatives to appear to explain why their products were so much more expensive in Australia than they are in America.
Apple’s prices don’t look too bad compared to their American counterprices in the Land Down Under, but that’s not true of Adobe. In fact, to purchase a complete set of Adobe’s Creative Suite Applications, you’ll pay $1,400 more than in the United States… making it cheaper for Australian creative professionals to actually fly to America to buy Adobe’s software in bulk.
Check out this video in which Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen is asked multiple times why this pricing differentiation exists on a digital good, in which he shiftily avoids answering the question at every turn. It’s unbelievably sleazy. No wonder Steve Jobs thought the Adobe guys were little shits.
Forget Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Oakland, Occupy Boston and all the rest of the 995 protests. The Occupy movement is now coming to your browser, but not how you’d expect: they want to eliminate Adobe Flash from all web browsers.
After years of promises and over a year of buggy, lame Android builds, Adobe’s finally ready to concede that Apple was right all along: Adobe is finally admitting that Flash is wholly unsuitable for phones and tablets and halting development, once and for all.
Six months ago, Steve Jobs wrote his Thoughts on Flash, which argued that Flash was a dying technology and that HTML5 was the future of video on the web.
See those graph numbers up there? They were put together by MeFeedia and show that HTML5 has gone from serving up only 10% of the videos on the web earlier this year to over half of them in October. HTML5 video has, in fact, doubled its share of the web video pie in just five months.
Looks like Steve was right. Not that any of us should be surprised: even if Flash wasn’t a dying technology, Steve flat out calling it one would be enough to almost magically make it so. When Apple’s CEO talks, the tech world sits up and listens.
