This is going to be interesting, because if they do manage to put flash and Air on a broad range of other platforms then we will see Jobs's assertion about cross platform frameworks slowing down progress be put to the test.
It already has been put to the test, in countless other situations. For example, look at video game consoles -- crossplatform libraries ensure that really high quality games can be ported to every major platform. Do they lack some features of some consoles? Yes. Regardless, are they still hella fun to play? Of course!
Well see even there it's Job's contention that crossplatform frameworks should have displaced native frameworks and limited the hardware manufacturers to effectively just supporting the crossplatform frameworks.
Surely the best argument against Job's position is the iPhone itself. The most important and dominant crossplatform framework in the world is HTML+JS and Apple actually wanted it to take the place of native frameworks. But we all know how that ended and now we have the App Store.
To support his fears on crossplatform frameworks they would have to supplant native apps and I just don't think it happens. OSX's problems with inferior crossplatform titles stem from a comparative lack of native applications - not from the crossplatform software itself.
> Surely the best argument against Job's position is the iPhone itself. The most important and dominant crossplatform framework in the world is HTML+JS and Apple actually wanted it to take the place of native frameworks. But we all know how that ended and now we have the App Store.
And with this paragraph you exactly proved why Flash doesn't have sense on the iPhone.
Another aspect to this is the constantly cited metric of "number of apps" (which seems totally bogus to me, but that's another argument). The instant Flash arrives on a platform it becomes arguable that that platform rivals if not exceeds the iPhone app store in number of "apps".
When iPhone advocates say "but we have 200,000 apps" and Android advocates can simply reply "well we have 50,000 apps and 200,000 flash apps of at least the same quality as 150,000 of the apps on the iPhone".
