Reading Steve Jobs recent missive on Adobe Flash raises an interesting question: What about users?

First, let’s get a few things straight. The iPhone and iPad are designed for ease of use and were not designed for the hardcore nerd. There is very little customization and your choice of applications is limited to those that Apple approves. It is a tightly controlled ecosystem and they are nearly idiot-proof media consumption tools. While there are some cool and geeky business applications (as Gabe points out), the majority of users are non-technical and just want a simple and good experience.

That said, most iPad and iPhone users don’t care whether the content they are consuming is in Flash or HTML5 – they just want to see it. Jobs post on Flash wasn’t about the user preferences as much as it was about his own preference and making business decisions that exclusively benefits Apple. This is not about the user experience at all – but it should be.

On the technical merits of his argument, he’s right but hypocritical - Flash isn’t “open” but neither is the iPhone or iPad. Jobs is also right that Flash is a heavy application and Adobe has done a miserable job of creating a light version for smart phones. I’m not going to argue that Flash is critical for a good user experience even though it’s widely used – it’s not all that elegant and it’s a resource and power hog… but it would still work.

Steve Jobs is being opportunistic. I suspect this has less to do with technical concerns or user experience than it is about money - Flash support on the iPhone and iPad would create create a huge hole for Apple’s App Store since Flash applications and games are available for free on the internet. Without Flash, you are forced to buy a non-Flash application from Apple. At the end of the day, this isn’t about the user experience, it’s about control and money.