Apple Showdown: Adobe Launches 'We Heart Choice' Campaign

As if to throw more fuel on the fire that is the Adobe Vs. Apple wars, Adobe has launched a small "We Heart Choice" campaign on their website and on third-party media sites. The goal is to educate users about Flash's 'openness' and basically poo-poo Apple's latest slew of restrictions. Here's quick and dirty rundown... Adobe's special new website area has three sections so far.

Dave Courbanou

May 17, 2010

3 Min Read

Apple Showdown: Adobe Launches 'We Heart Choice' Campaign

As if to throw more fuel on the fire that is the Adobe Vs. Apple wars, Adobe has launched a small “We Heart Choice” campaign on their website and on third-party media sites. The goal is to educate users about Flash’s ‘openness’ and basically poo-poo Apple’s latest slew of restrictions. Here’s quick and dirty rundown…

Adobe’s special new website area has three sections so far.

The freedom of choice section is a press-release style rundown of Adobe and what the ‘freedom of choice’ means for them. Adobe asserts that “openness” is that their core support all technology that enables people to ‘openly express themselves and access information where and when they want.’ According to Adobe “Everyone loses when technological barriers impede the exchange of ideas.”

The ‘Truth about Flash’ section is a small section debunking a few of the things that Apple CEO Steve Jobs had asserted, including statistics on how ubiquitous Flash is, and that Flash’s issues with not being written for ‘touch’ input are simply not true. There’s also some interesting words on the performance of Flash and the CPU intensive nature of it. Adobe admits that Flash consumes CPU power, especially with high-definition video. But Adobe has introduced hardware acceleration in their latest implementation and they’re constantly working on improving Flash.

Also, Flash has a strong track record for secure software design. Adobe says:

The Symantec Global Internet Threat Report for 2009 found that Flash Player had the second lowest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed (which included both web plug-ins and browsers). This is significant when you consider that Flash Player is among the most widely distributed and used pieces of software in the world.

Coming from Symantec, that has the potential to be some food for though, though no one has really spoken about the security issues with HTML5, a potential alternative to Flash.

Lastly, Chuck Geschke and John Warnock, the Co-founders of Adobe have their own open letter stressing the idea of openness and innovation. It’s not anything anyone would argue with, but the end of the letter has some irony attached with it, whether Adobe realizes it or not…

We believe that Apple…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.

This story is here merely to outline Adobe’s strategy and counter-attack on Apple, but there’s some irony in the fact that Adobe in some ways has de-facto ‘control’ of the web because Flash has become so ubiquitous. I’m not here to expound into detail my arguments, I’ve already made them clear. It’s just something to think about. Flip it around.

Bottom line? Adobe isn’t taking Steve Jobs’ attacks lying down. I expect that Adobe and Apple will continue to do battle on this in the future, and the “We Heart Choice” campaign is something that is destined to go viral, especially with so many strong opinions.

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