If Apple wants to kill Flash, why don't they just buy Adobe?

March 11, 10:58 AMColumbus Technology ExaminerPaul Williams

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Apple's lack of support for Adobe Flash is well-known.  Apple claims that Flash is a CPU-hog, drains battery life on its iPhone and iPod Touch mobile devices, and they won't be supporting it on their upcoming iPad slate device.

Some pundits argue while Apple's technical rationale makes sense, the reason they don't support Flash has as much to do with controlling content on their devices as anything else.  App Store sales could definitely fall if a bunch of free Flash games became playable on the iPhone.

Just buy Adobe, Steve Jobs

Since Apple is flush with cash, why don't they just buy Adobe?   Andrew Flocchini of the Apple Blog suggests as much in a recent posting.  The synergies between the Mac and Adobe's graphics products like Illustrator and Photoshop make perfect sense, with the added benefit of protecting Apple's App Store content.

Even on the desktop, Apple's apparent refusal to release details of the hardware acceleration portions of their API to Adobe means that Flash performs poorly on OS X compared to equivalently powered Windows machines.

Is Flash really a CPU hog?

A recent hardware test, performed by a video encoding expert and Adobe product author, showed that Flash even out-performed the soon-come HTML 5 when able to use hardware acceleration.  The test results are interesting, but still they took place on the desktop and ultimately the upcoming mobile OS war is between Apple and Google's Android OS with Microsoft hoping to get in the game with Windows Phone 7.  The latter two mobile operating systems both support Flash.

Still Apple can make all this gnashing irrelevant by getting out their checkbook and buying Adobe.  That would be a very interesting move and could very well cement their dominance in mobile operating systems.