Will Apple live to regret the Adobe affair?

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Apple's ongoing pitched battle against Adobe has without doubt been one of the juiciest stories of 2010 so far. A genuine slugfest between two A-List technology brands, the argument has swung back and forth for months now.

At times it's seemed a clash of principles, at others a battle of egos. Insults have led to accusations and more insults, and the issue at the heart of it all – the lack of Flash support in Apple's iPhone OS – has often been lost in the confusion.

For the record, the whole thing kicked off with Apple's launch of the iPad in January. With the Apple tablet running iPhone OS – which as any iPhone owner knows doesn't support Flash – Adobe gave voice to its frustrations in a blog post criticising Apple's unwillingness to co-operate. With everyone's radar tuned in to the slightest mention of the iPad, the comments were widely reported.

Apple boss Steve Jobs fired back almost instantly, criticising Flash for being buggy and a resource hog in seemingly offhand remarks made to an employee at a post-launch event, which predictably received equally widespread coverage.

The comments kept on coming, back and forth, at this point as much from opinionated technology hacks as the concerned parties themselves.

Things became serious, however, when Apple amended the iPhone operating system's licence agreement in early April to block apps created using the Adobe Flash to iPhone compiler, poised to be a key component of Adobe's flagship CS5 suite, which was just days away from launch.

Until that point there was the feeling that a solution could be found – in fact, in the Flash to iPhone compiler, it could be said that one already existed. But by snubbing Adobe so publicly, Apple not only added another name to its list of public enemies, but also largely proved Adobe's original point about its unwillingness to compromise.

Not alone

Either way, Adobe can at least draw some comfort from the fact that it's by no means alone in having been on the wrong end of Apple's uncompromising approach to doing business. It joins such luminaries as Google and old foe Microsoft in bearing the scars from daring to publicly stand up to Apple.

Indeed, this sort of thing seems to happen rather a lot whenever Apple is involved. There's certainly no company able to divide opinion – be it industry, journalistic or public opinion – quite like the Cupertino-based tech giant.

In many ways, Apple is a victim of its own success. Once perceived - mostly by its own fans, to be fair - as a maverick catering to an open-minded minority of free thinkers, Apple is now an industry colossus, having carefully manipulated that reputation to forge incredible market momentum, thanks in no small part to some undeniably superb products.

The problem, and you'll find it lurking not far under the surface of all the various disputes Apple gets involved in, is that having built its products on proprietary foundations using in-house tools and methods – whether developed or acquired – Apple sees no reason to compromise now that this very approach has proven so successful.

As a relatively minor player, this unwavering self-belief – at times almost religious in its fervour – successfully created a siege mentality that makes Apple a company like no other. Who else can take a new product all the way from the drawing board to launch without a single tangible leak escaping? Yet Apple can - though not always, as Gizmodo's renegade iPhone 4G proves.

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