Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

Flash, the App Store, and Control
Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end control was manifested in other battles as well. At the town hall 
meeting where he attacked Google, he also assailed Adobe’s multimedia platform for websites, 
Flash, as a “buggy” battery hog made by “lazy” people. The iPod and iPhone, he said, would 
never run Flash. “Flash is a spaghetti-ball piece of technology that has lousy performance and 
really bad security problems,” he said to me later that week.
He even banned apps that made use of a compiler created by Adobe that translated Flash code 
so that it would be compatible with Apple’s iOS. Jobs disdained the use of compilers that allowed 
developers to write their products once and have them ported to multiple operating systems. 
“Allowing Flash to be ported across platforms means things get dumbed down to the lowest 
common denominator,” he said. “We spend lots of effort to make our platform better, and the 
developer doesn’t get any benefit if Adobe only works with functions that every platform has. So 
we said that we want developers to take advantage of our better features, so that their apps work 
better on our platform than they work on anybody else’s.” On that he was right. Losing the ability 

---

to differentiate Apple’s platforms—allowing them to become commoditized like HP and Dell 
machines—would have meant death for the company.
There was, in addition, a more personal reason. Apple had invested in Adobe in 1985, and 
together the two companies had launched the desktop publishing revolution. “I helped put Adobe 
on the map,” Jobs claimed. In 1999, after he returned to Apple, he had asked Adobe to start 
making its video editing software and other products for the iMac and its new operating system, 
but Adobe refused. It focused on making its products for Windows. Soon after, its founder, John 
Warnock, retired. “The soul of Adobe disappeared when Warnock left,” Jobs said. “He was the 
inventor, the person I related to. It’s been a bunch of suits since then, and the company has turned 
out crap.”
When Adobe evangelists and various Flash supporters in the blogosphere attacked Jobs for 
being too controlling, he decided to write and post an open letter. Bill Campbell, his friend and 
board member, came by his house to go over it. “Does it sound like I’m just trying to stick it to 
Adobe?” he asked Campbell. “No, it’s facts, just put it out there,” the coach said. Most of the 
letter focused on the technical drawbacks of Flash. But despite Campbell’s coaching, Jobs couldn’
t resist venting at the end about the problematic history between the two companies. “Adobe was 
the last major third party developer to fully adopt Mac OS X,” he noted.
Apple ended up lifting some of its restrictions on cross-platform compilers later in the year, and 
Adobe was able to come out with a Flash authoring tool that took advantage of the key features of 
Apple’s iOS. It was a bitter war, but one in which Jobs had the better argument. In the end it 
pushed Adobe and other developers of compilers to make better use of the iPhone and iPad 
interface and its special features.
Jobs had a tougher time navigating the controversies over Apple’s desire to keep tight control over 
which apps could be downloaded onto the iPhone and iPad. Guarding against apps that contained 
viruses or violated the user’s privacy made sense; preventing apps that took users to other 
websites to buy subscriptions, rather than doing it through the iTunes Store, at least had a business 
rationale. But Jobs and his team went further: They decided to ban any app that defamed people, 
might be politically explosive, or was deemed by Apple’s censors to be pornographic.
The problem of playing nanny became apparent when Apple rejected an app featuring the 
animated political cartoons of Mark Fiore, on the rationale that his attacks on the Bush 
administration’s policy on torture violated the restriction against defamation. Its decision became 
public, and was subjected to ridicule, when Fiore won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for editorial 
cartooning in April. Apple had to reverse itself, and Jobs made a public apology. “We’re guilty of 
making mistakes,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can, we’re learning as fast as we can—but 
we thought this rule made sense.”
It was more than a mistake. It raised the specter of Apple’s controlling what apps we got to see 
and read, at least if we wanted to use an iPad or iPhone. Jobs seemed in danger of becoming the 
Orwellian Big Brother he had gleefully destroyed in Apple’s “1984” Macintosh ad. He took the 
issue seriously. One day he called the