Walt Mossberg Tells Adobe CEO To His Face That Flash Sucks On Android

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Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 5.20.54 PM

Ouch! Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen took stage today at the All Things Digital D9 conference to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg.

Watch the smug get slapped right off of Narayen’s face after he laughably tries to claim that contrary to Steve Jobs’s argument that Flash is a dead technology, it’s currently running on 130 million Android devices.

Here’s the transcript.

Mossberg: What’s the deal between you and Steve Jobs? He was here last year, and he had a chance to expand on what he had previously written about [Flash], and summarized, he said “Well, I think our duty is to pick technologies in the ascendancy. We feel like Flash is not on the ascendency, we think HTML 5 is, so that’s who we decided to go with for iOS Devices. What’s your respons eto that?

Narayen: There are a lot of misperceptions out there. When it first broke, people talked about the fact that they thought it was a technology issue, and I think it’s become fairly clear over the last year that it’s not about the technology: it’s about a business model issue. It’s about control of a platform. It’s the control of the app store that’s really at issue here. The value proposition Flash has is that we allow people to author programs once and get them to as many devices as possible. We’ve done that with Android. We will have 130 million phone devices that will have Flash on them by the end of the year…

Mossberg: And I have yet to test a single one where Flash works really well. I’m sorry. They struggle on those Android devices.

Freeze frame Narayen’s face. He looks like he’s been slapped, and he just completely struggles to counter. That’s a man who knows his product sucks on mobile, and is just trying to bide his time until mobile technology becomes advanced enough that Flash’s performance issues don’t matter.

Full video is here. Watch the whole thing.

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