Fighting back
It's not often you get Steve Jobs appearing in public at anything other than one of Apple's heavy choreographed product launches, so it's at least intriguing to see what he has to say when he is out of that comfort zone.
The WSJ has an annual tech conference, this year called D8 and Jobs was the first of a number of prominent tech figures to take to the stage and face questioning. The affiliated All Thing D site live-blogged from the event and, while it stressed the blog shouldn't be taken as an accurate transcript, we've extracted a few morsels from it regardless.
The first question referred to Apple's lack of support for Adobe Flash on its iPhone OS. "Apple is a company that doesn't have the most resources in the world," said Jobs, "and the way we've succeeded is to bet the right technological horse, to look at technologies that have a future. We try to pick things that are in their springs. And if you choose wisely, you can be quite successful.
"We didn't set out to have a war over Flash. We made a technical decision. And it wasn't until the iPad that Adobe raised a stink. They came after us....That's why I wrote ‘Thoughts on Flash'...We were getting tired of being trashed by Adobe in the press.
"We're just trying to make great products. We don't think Flash makes a great product, so we're leaving it out. Instead, we're going to focus on technologies that are in ascendancy. If we succeed, people will buy them and if we don't they won't....And, so far, I have to say, people seem to be liking the iPad. We sell like three iPads a second."
Regarding the ‘lost' next-gen iPhone: "To make a wireless product work well, you have to test it. And one of our employees was carrying one and there's a debate about whether it was left in a bar or stolen....And the person who found it decided to sell it...and it turned out this person plugged it into his roommate's computer and that roommate called the police. And the police showed up and took this guy's computers...and the DA is investigating it...and I don't know where it will end up."
