Apple is not attending the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this week, but its presence has certainly been felt by several of the conference’s high-profile speakers.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was asked about plans to link the social network to Apple’s new Ping service. Apple chief executive has described Facebook’s terms as “onerous”; Zuckerberg said Apple needs to realise that everything is going to be social.
Apple, he said, needs to “get on the bus”.
That is exactly what Adobe chief executive Shantanu Narayen wishes Apple would do with Flash — while in fact it is moving in the opposite direction. Echoing comments made by Adobe technology boss Kevin Lynch last week, Narayen said the two companies are engaged in a “war” to attract app developers.
“Adobe’s always been about helping people create content for multiple different devices and multiple platforms and bringing the power of that rich media, so I think Apple and Adobe are on different sides of this struggle for control,” Narayen said.
“Apple would like to create a closed and proprietary system, for developers to make applications that only work on ‘i’ devices, and continue to just operate on ‘i’ devices.”
One platform where Adobe will hope to attract developers is RIM’s announced but unseen BlackBerry Playbook take on the tablet computer. Unlike the iPad, Playbook will run both Flash and Adobe AIR applications and according to RIM’s co-chief executive Jim Balsillie, that might be all that developers need.
“We believe that you can bring the mobile to the web,” he said. “That’s the core part of our message. You can use your [existing] development environment. You can use your Notepad. You can use your web tools. You can use all the normal logic tools that you use. And you can publish your apps to the BlackBerry without writing any native code.”
