Happy Birthday To Steve Jobs’ Screed Against Flash

It was 15 years ago to day that Apple boss Steve Jobs published a blog post railing against Adobe Flash <https://www.theverge.com/apple/657934/happy-birthday-to-steve-jobs-screed-against-flash>, particularly about how it impinged on Apple’s control over its own platform: If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers. In hindsight, we all know now about the problems with lack of open standards, security and battery life. But as always, at the time, there were those who played down these problems and who assumed that, because Flash was so prevalent, it would remain so into the future. There’s a lesson in there, about history repeating itself ...
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro