Steve Jobs’ Flash Thoughts Find Support from Microsoft, Has Hell Frozen Over?

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You probably all recall Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash we showed you yesterday followed by a fierce response from Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen. But it looks like Microsoft also wants to have a say in all this as it has directly responded to the Flash matter.

In a not-so-long post over on the Internet Explorer blog, Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager, Internet Explorer, basically says that “the future of the web is HTML5” and that’s very early into the article. Sure he might be right but that’s the future. Until the future arrives we need to focus on the present and how to make the most of it now.

LTE and WiMAX are the future of telecommunications. But right now we can barely say we have a dependable 3G connection at all times and we’re very happy with 2G speeds on a number of occasions. When the time comes, should we purchase LTE-only handsets that can’t deal with 3G or 2G technologies?

Like 2G and 3G, Flash might be slowly dying, but does that mean we have to ditch it right away? Steve Jobs’ open letter from yesterday can be interpreted in many ways but Apple doesn’t hold the truth when it comes to Flash. Neither does Adobe, and I am sure that everything could be worked out if both companies would really want to compromise.

Microsoft is basically focusing on Flash and HTML5 in its latest post and it emphasizes the fact that Internet Explorer 9 will support playback of H.264. That’s great, but who uses Internet Explorer anymore? You’d have to admire their resilience when it comes to IE development, wouldn’t you?

H.264 might be the future of video but Flash is not only used for video. I am not defending Adobe here but just saying the obvious. Flash is used for a lot of other things than video which complete the web, so to speak.

What’s funny about this unnecessary Microsoft intervention, besides the fact they side with Apple which is really something uncommon, is that they don’t mention Silverlight anywhere.

You know, Silverlight is Microsoft’s own Flash version which, if I understand correctly, is part of the past as HTML5 is the future of the web. Any thoughts on Flash, folks?