We all expected Adobe to fire back at some point, but we weren’t expecting it to hit the airwaves so quickly today. Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Nareyen took some time to do an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
After a first read, I have to say I’m a little bit disappointed by some of the comments. They seem a little childish in my opinion. We don’t get any real commentary, and we certainly don’t get any good arguments from Narayen. He just toes the company line, and recycles the same arguments we’ve been hearing all along.
The highlight of the call is a huge facepalm moment in which the interviewer compares the feud between Adobe and Apple as the same between Jon and Kate Gosselin.
That’s not the only golden moment in the interview, though. Mr. Narayen blamed Apple’s operating system for the fact that OS X crashes a lot with Adobe products. In the same breath he then goes on to say that they’re dedicated to their products working across mobile platforms. He was probably making a direct reference to flash on mobile devices, but it’s hard to remove from the argument that the fact Adobe hasn’t been all that supportive of OS X or Apple products for a number of years now.
Besides, if Adobe was so open to ensuring their products were available on multiple platforms, why haven’t we seen it on any of the major Linux distros? Sounds like someone is paying lip service to the ideologies to me.
Here’s some golden nuggets from the article if you don’t want to read through the whole thing. Feel free to debate these quotes in the comments below.
“Mr. Narayen says that the difference is that Adobe believes in open content. He says that their Creative Suite software was designed to work on multiple devices and that Apple’s “recent behavior shows that they are concerned about Adobe being able” to provide this product that works across multiple platforms.”
“Mr. Narayan says that Adobe has been “true to the position” with which it was founded and to the idea that it should help people deal with multiple operating systems.”
“The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are “really a smokescreen,” Mr. Narayan says.”
“Speaking about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is the No. 1 cause of Mac crashes, Mr. Narayan says if Adobe crashes Apple, that actually has something “to do with the Apple operating system.”
“Responding to a question about Mr. Jobs’s assertion that Adobe is a closed platform, Mr. Narayan chuckles. “I find it amusing, honestly. Flash is an open specification,” he says.”
“We have different views of the world,” Mr. Narayan says. “Our view of the world is multi-platform.”
