Apple's Steve Jobs takes aim at Flash during WSJ iPad demo

Posted by Trafton Kenney on February 19, 2010 at 1:06 PM

Anyone paying close attention to Steve Jobs' iPad demo last month would have noticed a blank space in the middle of The New York Times home page. As most technology pundits were quick to point out, it was caused by the iPad's glaring omission of Flash, the Adobe animation software used by newspapers like the Times and The Wall Street Journal for interactive graphics and video on their websites.

Earlier this month, Jobs travelled to New York for secret meetings with representatives of the Times and the Journal, presumably to demonstrate how the iPad works to staff and answer questions. Details emerged Thursday about what exactly Jobs had to say during his demo in the News Corporation building for Journal staff, in a report published in Gawker.

According to a source, when editors brought up the issue of Flash, Jobs dismissed the software as obsolete, equating it to floppy drives, data ports, and other bygone systems. "We don't spend a lot of time on old technology," Jobs reportedly said.

He called Flash a "CPU hog" which is full of "security holes." The ubiquitous animation software has been a cause for concern for Apple computers in the past. Flash is notoriously incompatible with some of the graphics processors built in to Apple devices. Jobs' decision to leave Flash off the iPad altogether struck some critics as cavalier.

The Journal's own Holman Jenkins criticized Apple for "becoming preoccupied with zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals" in an op-ed piece on February 10th.

The transition from Flash to an Apple-approved system like H.264 video compression would he "trivial," said Jobs. However, H.264, or "codec," works with video but not all other interactive graphics.

"Trivial" may be a bit of an understatement considering the amount of work and expertise necessary to not only replace the Flash slideshows, videos, and other graphics that the Times and Journal have embraced on their websites, but to make H.264 the new standard software in digital news publishing.

While the allure of the iPad remains as strong as ever, newspapers have some difficult decisions ahead. If they choose to join the Apple bandwagon, it seems likely Jobs will be dictating the terms. However, with their content driving devices like the iPad, newspapers also has some leverage. It seems a compromise is in order.

Sources: Gawker