Adobe announces ‘war’ against Apple

Shantanu Narayen

Another outburst from Adobe's top executive has fuelled the dispute between his company and Mac makers Apple.

During the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco which has already seen Facebook and Google make big announcements Shantanu Narayen, chief executive (CEO) of Adobe, claimed the different approaches the companies took put them more than at odds with each other; it put them at war.

"There's a war happening for developers," he said, according to Reuters. "Adobe has always been about helping people create content for multiple devices, multiple platforms Apple and Adobe are on different sides of that point of control."

Taking a further stab at the iPhone manufacturer, he added: "We're all about a multi-platform, heterogeneous, open ecosystem. And that's what we're going to be focused on. And Apple will continue to like to keep that closed and proprietary so let the games begin."

The battle between the two companies has been fought for a few years but the real war of words broke out between Narayen and Apple's CEO Steve Jobs back in April.

Jobs wrote a rare public letter, following a lot of back and forth between other Adobe and Apple executives, which claimed Adobe's Flash was the "number one reason" for Macs crashing and, if included on the iPhone, would "hinder the enhancement and progress of the platform."

Narayen responded within a day, claiming the comments were just a "smokescreen" to keep its users under its control.

Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott is a former freelance journalist and currently political reporter for Sky News. She has a varied writing history, having started her career at Dennis Publishing, working in various roles across its business technology titles, including ITPro. Jennifer has specialised in a number of areas over the years and has produced a wealth of content for ITPro, focusing largely on data storage, networking, cloud computing, and telecommunications.

Most recently Jennifer has turned her skills to the political sphere and broadcast journalism, where she has worked for the BBC as a political reporter, before moving to Sky News.