FedEx Offers Customers $5 for the Inconvenience of Requiring Adobe Flash

Ina Fried, writing for Axios:

Adobe Flash has been on the ropes since Steve Jobs went on his famous tirade 7 years ago, but that doesn’t mean some sites don’t still require it.

For its part, FedEx is apologizing to customers and offering $5 discount for the fact that printing labels online still requires the browser plug-in.

FedEx needs to get its shit together. This is pathetic.

Also, “tirade” is a terrible description of Steve Jobs’s “Thoughts on Flash”. The dictionary defines tirade as “a long, angry speech of criticism or accusation”. Go ahead and re-read Jobs’s essay. There’s not a single angry word in it. What made it so devastating is that it wasn’t angry. It was calm, cool, collected, and true.

If it had been an angry rant, it would have been easily dismissed without needing to be factually refuted — “That’s just Jobs being a prick again.” The fact that it wasn’t angry, and because it was all true, made it impossible to refute.

(Via Dave Pell’s NextDraft.)

★ Friday, 24 March 2017