Apple iPad vs. Adobe — what’s going on and why Adobe is playing the porn card…

There’s a slew of blog posts the past couple days about Apple’s decision not support Adobe Flash on it’s upcoming tablet, the iPad. Things got interesting today. Adobe employee, Lee Brimelow, fired back with a blog post that really shows off Adobe Flash… and it’s use on porn sites. Apparently, the blog post was short lived but below is a screenshot:

Photo courtesy of IntoMobile via TheFlashBlog via Wired

Despite the silliness, there’s a real war being waged here with a significant amount of money at stake. Apple makes a ton of money off of the App Store. If it allowed developers access to the iPad through Adobe Flash, they could circumvent the App Store and target consumers through the browser. (This is the route Google is going with HTML versions of Google Voice for the iPhone after being shut out from the App Store.) It’s no secret that Adobe wants Flash-based games to be the future in mobile device gaming. Google (yeah, I always tie things into Google), on the other hand, supports fully open operating systems. At the inaugural showing of the Google Nexus One, Google made it clear that the Nexus One will have native flash support in the future.

This difference in approaches leaves consumers in a quandary. On the one hand, Apple is the great innovator but rules it devices with an iron first. On the other hand, Google is not a hardware innovator but allows consumers significant choice. It seems like most consumers are wooed by innovation these days. Google sorely needs hardware innovation like being the first to offer an RFID equipped phone because choice plus innovation could dethrone Apple in the mobile phone arena. And, from Google’s perspective, the sooner the better. It’s going to be tough to compete with 100,000 Apple app developers and a few million apps in the App Store.

[inspired by IntoMobile]

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