Steve Jobs spinned the hottest debates of this year few days back, inclusion of Flash in Apple products. Steve justified his companies decision of excluding Flash from their gear with technical reasoning.
Steve Jobs’s essay, “Thoughts on flash” , where the discussion started, spoke about Flash being used for rendering video. He prominently pointed out that if Flash provided for 75% of video on web, it was more or less present in the modern H.264 format which is supported by Apple’s lineup of iPhones, iPods and iPads.
For those who thought Steve’s reasoning was counterfactual (including Adobe), here are some facts which they would like to digest.
Hell now, H.264 now makes 66% of the web video while Flash is just wavering with some 26%. This means, one strong fact over which Adobe argued has been washed away! All the stats were provided by encoding.com which has encoded over five million videos for high scale clients like MTV. Well, if you know YouTube also provides all it’s video in H.264 format which means a huge part of the web video is already available in the new formats. [Thanks Techcrunch]
I feel that Adobe cannot publicly go on criticizing Apple for it’s decision, after all it’s their devices and their wish. It’s wrong on Adobe’s part too and as far as what it looks to me, i think Apple has got it right though losing up a bit to allow specific flash components to work could be a win-win for customers and developers both.
