Jobs' Town Hall meeting

> A number of outlets received supposed second-hand reports from Apple’s “town hall” style meeting with employees last week. For starters, I hate reading stories like this one. I used to work at Apple way back when, and I understood that what was said at private company meetings was meant as a rallying cry for the troops, not something that should be quoted back to the press.

I have no idea exactly what Jobs said at this meeting, but I can say that if there is any truth to the rumor that he said Google’s ‘Don’t be Evil’ mantra is “a load of crap”, I can’t disagree with him.

‘Don’t be Evil’ is marketing, people. If you think any corporation is capable of not being evil, you really don’t know what a corporation is. Corporations are evil by definition. They exist to make money for stockholders at any cost. And being evil always makes more money than being good.

And as far as Adobe being lazy, and Flash being a dead technology, I have to say, I’m happy to hear that Steve believes that, because I do, too. Adobe made its power play, concentrating all of its efforts on making Flash ubiquitous, so that it could literally own the web. And it almost got away with it.

But along the way, Adobe stopped innovating where it traditionally did best, and failed to comprehend the importance of the emerging mobile market.

Let’s face it, Photoshop hasn’t really gotten any groundbreaking new features since layers were added in version 4. It’s a giant, convoluted mess of code at this point, that leaves it years behind when new technologies come along. How long did the port to native OS X Carbon take? 64-bit is still not there on the Mac side. The big feature in Photoshop CS4 was that it takes less time to start up. That’s just sad.

It’s obvious that Adobe’s attention is elsewhere. Otherwise, by now it would have done what Apple and Microsoft did with their operating systems recently; start fresh and dump the old code for something sleeker, more powerful, and easier to maintain. Instead, Adobe was busy adding more ways to embed ads into Flash videos.

They’re lucky no one with enough money has come along to challenge Photoshop in the meantime. There are plenty of good apps out there like Pixelmator; if Apple were to buy one of them and make a true pro product out of it, Adobe could find itself with some serious competition for the first time in years.

The sooner Flash dies, the better off the world will be. I just hope Adobe sees the writing on the wall in time to shift focus back to its core strengths.