I keep coming back to this thought:

Adobe is upset that their highly proprietary software — Flash — is locked out of Apple’s highly proprietary platform — iPhone OS. My very mature one word response is, “So?”

Proprietary, closed-source software means the developer/company can do with it what they want. They can choose who they want to allow into their sandbox, and who they want to keep out.

I’m not saying this to absolve Apple. I think some of their policies have been overly heavy handed. But, it is their hyper-controlling nature that spits out a very polished product. They make good products, and most importantly, they make good products that people want to spend their hard earned money on. It’s as if the recent recession didn’t exist in Cupertino.

Yes, Flash is installed on something insane like +96% of all computers in the world. So what? Real Player was installed all over the place back in the late 1990s, and where is it today?

Technologies come, and technologies go. The web development world is beginning to move beyond Flash, and Adobe better recognize that quickly.