Adobe CEO says Honeycomb tablets will overtake iPad. Flash bias, anyone?
Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen has stated that he believes tablets running Google’s Honeycomb OS will eventually win out over the now-dominant iPad produced by Apple, just as Google’s Android smartphones too are beginning to edge ahead of Apple’s iPhone.
“What you saw with smartphones hitting an inflection point with Android, you’ll see it again with tablets,” he said.
That’s not to say the Adobe CEO doesn’t have good reason to support Google over Apple; Adobe and Apple have been at logger-heads for some time since Steve Jobs attacked the software, calling it buggy and a battery drain, leading to its omission from iOS devices. But Narayen suggests that the disagreement lies with conflicting business strategies rather than actual software conflicts.
“Its a business model issue, its all about control of the applications that you can run on that platform that bring that platform to life. What Apple doesn’t allow us to do is to build flash content within the browser,” he said.
“If you can build the application using our tools and compile it down to the iDevice platform that works.”
Narayen was also surprisingly full of praise for HTML 5, Adobe’s main competitor in the browser plug-in field and stating that Adobe will be building tools to help with the development of HTML 5:
“We actually not only welcome the evolution of HTML, we are actively contributing to it. Adobe is contributing typographic expertise and design aesthetics.”
For the full interview with Narayen, head over to AllThingsD.
