Adobe Launches “Freedom of Choice” Campaign in Response to Apple
The tech war is on between Apple and Adobe, and it’s starting to sound political. What’s fairly interesting is how Adobe’s been running “We [heart] Apple” as well as “We [heart] Choice” ads, suggesting that this tech war is all about word choice — or perhaps the word, “choice.”
The lack of Flash on Apple mobile devices has been a growing issue, especially since the release of the iPad. Apple’s omission left a lot of creatives, including photographers, scrambling to find a substitute for Flash-based sites.
A few weeks ago, Steve Jobs published his thoughts behind Apple’s movement away from Flash capabilities in mobile products.
Today, Adobe’s co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock responded in an open letter that was published in newspaper ads and on its website, titling it “Our Thoughts on Open Markets.” The letter launched alongside a new section on Adobe’s site called “Freedom of Choice.”Adobe also published a page titled “The truth about Flash,” which responds point-by-point to most of Jobs’ arguments.
Jobs had ended his letter with a stab at Adobe, saying:
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.
Adobe responded:
We believe that Apple, by taking the opposite approach, has taken a step that could undermine this next chapter of the web — the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.
In the end, we believe the question is really this: Who controls the World Wide Web? And we believe the answer is: nobody — and everybody, but certainly not a single company.
So far this seems to be a war of words; Apple and Adobe are fighting over ownership of what “open,” really means and what the future of the Internet (and your portfolio) will look like.
Let us know where you stand on the issue in the comments.
