Five ¢ents

Steve Jobs, almost three years after the first iPhone shipped:

Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it.

Clearly, now we never will.

Fun fact: back in 1998, I was the grand prize winner for a sweepstakes run by Macromedia, called “Flash 3, Match 2”. I received a then-top-of-the-line Power Mac G3 266 tower in the mail. It was glorious. I remember using that machine to watch the 1999 QuickTime live stream of the MacWorld Keynote, where Jobs unveiled the over-saturated but gorgeous Yosemite G3. Ouch.

Oddly, the sweepstakes didn’t include a copy of Flash 3, the product it was meant to promote. (Flash was worth far less than the machine, but more than I could absorb as a student.) At that moment in time, Flash was a wonder, and plain HTML was a straitjacket. I wonder if, had they included the sweepstakes’ raison d’être, if I wouldn’t have become a Flash jockey. Instead I supported web standards in my work, quietly snickered when vendors would discuss Flash Lite as the future of mobile entertainment, and even contributed to the lauded Flash blocker, ClickToFlash. Whoops.