Adobe CTO slams Apple as 'anti-internet'

Harsh words at Web 2.0 conference.

Adobe's chief technical officer Kevin Lynch has slammed Apple's policy on Flash as anti-competitive and anti-internet.

“If you look at what's going on right now Apple's playing with this strategy where they want to create a walled garden around what applications people can use,” he told delegates at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

He compared the situation to railroad industry in the 1800s, where different operators would have different sized tracks, which meant cargo has to be loaded and unloaded every time the railroad cars changed networks. This harmed industry and economic activity in the US he said.

“That's what attempting to be done right now and I think that's totally counter to the internet. Totally counter to the web. We need to have freedom of transport, open access and letting people compete on the merits they have, not on the gauge of the rails.”

He continued that Apple's problem with Flash was that Adobe had made it work, not that it was buggy as Steve Jobs has claimed, and Apple didn't want applications that could be deployed across all platforms. Once Apple blocked Flash Adobe had no choice but to shun the platform.

He predicted that the variety of software for open vendors would force Apple to change its policy. He likened the situation to 1984 in the personal computer industry, where IBM tried to dictate the PC market.

Adobe would not be blindsided by HTML5, he said, as it is preparing tools for the technology that would be the best available.