May 3, 2024

Mossberg Tells Adobe CEO That Flash Performs Terribly on Mobile [Video]

Posted June 3, 2011 at 12:13am by iClarified · 10159 views
Walt Mossberg interviewed Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the All Things D: D9 conference today. After Narayen claims that there is no technology issues with running Flash on mobile devices, Mossberg tells him he has yet to test a single one where Flash works really well.

Mossberg: What’s the deal between you and Steve Jobs? He was here last year, and he had a chance to expand on what he had previously written about [Flash], and summarized, he said “Well, I think our duty is to pick technologies in the ascendancy. We feel like Flash is not on the ascendency, we think HTML 5 is, so that’s who we decided to go with for iOS Devices. What’s your response to that?

Narayen: There are a lot of misperceptions out there. When it first broke, people talked about the fact that they thought it was a technology issue, and I think it’s become fairly clear over the last year that it’s not about the technology: it’s about a business model issue. It’s about control of a platform. It’s the control of the app store that’s really at issue here. The value proposition Flash has is that we allow people to author programs once and get them to as many devices as possible. We’ve done that with Android. We will have 130 million phone devices that will have Flash on them by the end of the year…

Mossberg: And I have yet to test a single one where Flash works really well. I’m sorry. They struggle on those Android devices.

Take a look at the interview clip below...

[via CultofMac]