Second-Hand Reports From Steve Jobs’s All-Hands Town Hall Meeting at Apple Last Week

Take it with a big grain of salt, because it’s second-hand and illustrated with a goofily menacing photo of Jobs, but Wired has a report on Jobs’s post-iPad all-hands company meeting:

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there’s no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don’t be evil mantra: “It’s bullshit.” Audience roars.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

Sounds about right to me. If anyone who was there disputes Wired’s synopsis, I’m all ears.

Update: Arnold Kim has a few more tidbits. And one DF-reading little birdie emailed to say that while the gist is right, the Wired transcript is clearly paraphrased: “He actually said ‘teams at Google want to kill us.’ He never said it in a way that made it sound like the whole company did. Mostly just the Android team.” Update 2: Another little birdie in attendance tells me, “The quote was actually, ‘Don’t be evil is a load of crap,’” and that Jobs was nostalgic about the kick-ass Adobe of old.

★ Sunday, 31 January 2010