Exhibit A in the Case That Newly-Hired Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch Is a Bozo, a Bad Hire

He wrote this, just three years ago:

Some have been surprised at the lack of inclusion of Flash Player on a recent magical device. […]

We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs. Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web.

Well, how’d that work out? Those companies and platforms are now either (a) out of business, (b) on the verge of going out of business, or (c) have abandoned Flash Player entirely.

For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1.

Yeah, it rocked so hard Google dropped Flash Player support from Android last year.

Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

And now here we are today in the dark ages of video, where we can only see by the light of the millions of HTML5 videos playing on Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and iOS mobile devices.

I have a bad feeling about this.

★ Tuesday, 19 March 2013