Adobe Hearts Apple

The slap fight going on between Apple and Adobe has reached another level. Adobe’s new ad campaign features a slogan, “We <3 Apple”.  Adobe took out full-page ads in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to let Steve Jobs know just how they feel. The ad comes off a little sarcastic but it really tries to make Jobs look like the bad-guy. It’s like Adobe is saying, “Hey, we love Apple, but they don’t love us back.” Adobe claims that Apple is not allowing inovation on the internet and that Adobe is all about creative freedom. This ad comes on the heels of a statement from Steve Jobs stating his position in the open platform issue.  Adobe isn’t trying to flatter Apple, what they are really saying is that they love developers and the developer community. After all, developers would like to be able to develop products that work on multiple platforms. Developers that know Flash now have to learn HTML 5. The Adobe campaign is set up to reiterate its position that it loves Flash developers, why doesn’t Apple? I think the last few lines of the ad says it all.

According to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, the Adobe/Apple battle royal is not about Flash video. Basically, it is a platform war, Apple hasn’t just built great devices they have built a powerful iPhone and iPad platform that developers want to be on. Apple is taking over the future of the internet and Adobe wants to be included.

If nothing changes, in the end developers will just have to develop for different platforms. This can just be attributed to a natural part of the technology industry. New innovations require new development tactics.