Apple Hires Former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, Destroyer of iPhones 209
Nerval's Lobster writes "Why did Apple hire former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as vice president of technology? Adobe and Apple spent years fighting a much-publicized battle over the latter's decision to ban Adobe Flash from iOS devices. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was very public in his condemnation of Flash as a tool for rich-content playback, denigrating it in an April 2010 letter posted on Apple's Website as flawed with regard to battery life, security, reliability and performance. Lynch was very much the public face of Adobe's public-relations pushback to Apple's criticism; in a corporate video shot for an Adobe developer conference in 2009, he even helped run an iPhone over with a steamroller. (Hat tip to Daring Fireball's John Gruber for digging that video up.) As recently as 2010, he was still arguing that Flash was superior to HTML5, which eventually surpassed it to become the virtual industry standard for Web-based rich content. It's interesting to speculate whether Steve Jobs would have hired someone who so publicly denigrated Apple's flagship product. But Jobs is dead, and his corporate successors in Cupertino—tasked with leading Apple through a period of fierce competition — obviously looked at Lynch and decided he'd make a perfect fit as an executive."
Game of Thrones (Score:2, Interesting)
Tim Cook's at the helm now (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's as simple as Jobs' advice to Cook: "I never want you to ask what I would have done. Just do what's right."
Or maybe it's a cheap way to buy out an antagonist, let him spin his wheels in a harm-free zone for a couple years, and do what Apple does with less angst.
Flash (Score:5, Interesting)
I trust this doesn't mean they'll be bringing Flash back though *shudder*
It's one of those interesting points with Steve Jobs. At the time, the decision seemed awful and a lot of people were cheering on alternatives such as Android for including it. But a couple of years on it would seem that many share my view of: hey, he was right! Flash IS an awful resource drain, and because of him banning it from iOS there's been great progress towards HTML5 and the drive for efficiency. I seem to recall even Adobe have agreed it's the correct move at this point. Android has had Flash for a while but the latest versions have dropped it. It'd be so ironic if (unlikely) iOS gained Flash and everyone flocked to Android to get away from it this time.
Re:If you can't beat them... (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem is, Adobe gave up the fight, outsourced, and has a crappy CEO who wants to outsource the entire company to India. So yes, it was a smart move to bail on Adobe. They mis-played their hand big time.
Re:Game of Thrones (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but HBO feels they'll have more rating if they show them having sex while explaining their reasons for stabbing each other in the back.
Re:Apple banned Adobe because iPhone sucked. (Score:5, Interesting)
It turned out that their preferred design for GPU offload involved decoding H.264 on the GPU, copying the frames back to main memory, compositing them on the CPU, and then copying the resulting frames back to the CPU. As you can imagine, this was a long way from being the fastest possible solution.
Re:Do you honestly believe.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone's replying in agreement to you, but that is not the reason why people are concerned.
The reason is that this guy wasn't an employee, he was CTO. As CTO, he had the power to influence decisions.
He didn't have to follow the company's lead, he was the one dictating what that was.
And he sucked at that.