Adobe is a company that is open to criticism, listens to its customers and critics, and is working hard to improve Flash on the Mac and on smartphones. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch made the comments in a video interview with Kara Swisher if AllThingsDigital.
Ms. Swisher asked Mr. Lynch if he was lazy, a direct reference to comments Apple CEO Steve Jobs reportedly made during an Apple employee Town Hall meeting where he called Adobe Lazy and criticized Flash for its poor performance and security problems.
"Well, it feels pretty busy around here, so I'm not sure what that's about," Mr. Lynch said. He added that his company was focused on making a great product, and emphasized that it was open to criticism and was listening to its customers.
"Performance on the Macintosh is an area that we're working on, and we've been working on [it] for a while now. Even back to Flash Player 9, we got vector graphics to render comparably on the Mac and Windows. Now we're working really hard to make sure video renders using similar CPU usage across Mac and Windows. Right now, Mac uses more CPU than Windows, so we're really focused [on that]."
When it comes to stability, "Certainly if there are issues, we will fix them," he said.
Mr. Lynch also addressed the issue of Apple not including Flash support on the iPhone, and likely the iPad, by saying that users don't get the full Web experience on devices without Flash. He added that Adobe and Apple work together all the time, and that Adobe was working with Apple's Safari team to continually improve Flash on Apple's product line.
[Author's Note of Irony: The Flash-based video of the interview crashed Safari while we were watching it for this report.]
You can listen to and watch the full interview in the video below (see the author's note above).
Video courtesy of AllThingsDigital