Having worked on the Apple account for several years, I can tell you the mercurial temperament of Steve Jobs is a fact. Short on patience and long on acidic ridicule, he takes the concept of feedback to withering heights, often reducing subordinates to quivering blobs of protoplasm. As a new profile in Fortune puts it, "Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are 'insanely great' or 'shit.' ... Subordinates are geniuses or 'bozos,' indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip from one category to another, in what Apple workers call his 'hero-shithead roller coaster.' " The public is spared this, always seeing Jobs in his well-rehearsed role of provider of beautiful technology, but once in a while he'll wield the whip for all to see. At Tuesday's Apple shareholders meeting, it was longtime ally Adobe feeling the lash, and all it could do was take it. Adobe's Flash technology is widely used by sites across the Web for everything from navigation to playing multimedia, but the browser in Apple's iPhone has never supported it, leaving a notable hole in its promise to deliver a complete mobile Web experience. Adobe and a goodly number of developers were hoping that situation would change now that Apple is set to start accepting third-party apps for the phone. On Tuesday, Jobs shot down that speculation, wounding Adobe in the process. The full version of Flash is just too slow to run on the iPhone, Jobs said, and Flash Lite, the version made for mobile devices, just plain isn't good enough. "There's this missing product in the middle," Jobs said. Word of advice to Adobe, the Apple train is leaving the station. Better get aboard while you can!
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Please Steve... Sorry Steve... Give me another chance Steve... Please Steve!
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