Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer snuck into Adobe to talk with their CEO, Shantanu Narayen, about how they could team up, cartoon villain-style, to take on the growing mobile power of Apple and one Steven P. Jobs. the NYT Bits blog says:

The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could team up in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.

One person familiar with the discussion said the two companies had talked about the blockade that Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, had placed on Adobe’s Flash software for its hand-held devices and whether a partnership by Adobe and Microsoft could fend off Apple, which continues to grow at juggernaut speeds.

Crazier things have happened in tech, so let us know what you think. Would Microdobe (Adobesoft?) pose a larger threat to Apple than either currently does alone? Could we see an Flash Phone 7? CS5 Office Suite? And how will previous Adobe best-fremeny Google feel about being left to third wheel this little Legion of Doom?

[NYT Bits Blog]

Microsoft is working with Apple on getting Silverlight (their Flash-like technology) content onto the iPhone? Made our eyes widen as well, but it wasn’t what we expected. Unlike the debate over Flash, and a Flash player/plugin for iPhone, this doesn’t involve a Silverlight player/plugin at all, but what looks to be a much smarter backend solution. According to Microsoft User Experience Platform Manager Brian Goldfarb:

“So we’ve worked with Apple to create a server-side based solution with IIS Media Services,” Goldfarb continued, “and what we’re doing is taking content that’s encoded for smooth streaming and enabling the content owner to say, ‘I want to enable the iPhone.’ The server will dynamically make the content work — same content, same point of origin — on the iPhone. We do this with the HTML 5 <VIDEO> tag, in many ways.”

“We’re translating the content to support the MPEG2 v8 [decoder] format that the iPhone format; we’re moving it to their adaptive streaming format. So it’s the same IIS smooth streaming content, the same server, the same point of origin, but now I can get that content to play without any code changes, without any real work, on the iPhone. That’s the critical thing for our customers.”

Goldfarb clarifies that “worked with Apple” means his team did everything, but made sure Apple was “comfortable” with the solution.

TiPb clarifies that if this ends up working well, it gets more video to more iPhone users without the security, privacy, performance, and dodgy plugin architecture that plagues desktop implementations of code-interpreters.

So add to the list of YouTube, Ustream, Stickam, and Vimeo, we could now see all Silverlight video (including Netflix?) made compatible with the iPhone and H.264.

Rather than Flash 10.1, maybe Adobe should be looking to build this cleaner, safer-sounding solution into their next plugin as well?

[Betanews via 9to5mac]

Well, at least kill the need for Flash on the iPhone? Daring Fireball says a simple “yes” to Yahoo! Tech‘s question.

The idea is that a standards based technology, open and broadly used, could make redundant proprietary and sometimes bloated and buggy plugins like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

Apple’s Safari, including Mobile Safari on the iPhone, and Mozilla Firefox are already supporting HTML5 features. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — so far — isn’t.

The article gives pros and cons for both sides of the debate. Since Apple is introduction the third generation of their iPhone software tomorrow, and still no Flash in sight, we likely have a good idea which way they’re leaning already…

If the next great future of computing in the Cloud, as many pundits — not to mention Google — think, then the next great race is delivering that future via Rich Internet Applications. Right now, there are two major ways of doing this. The first involves using a proprietary, locked in technology (admittedly with increasing “openness”) like Adobe’s Air/Flex/Flash trifecta, or Microsoft’s .Net/Silverlight double team. The second is with truly open standards such as HTML, CSS, and AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML) like Google, Yahoo, and many others use.

With the iPhone Apple has squarely planted itself in the second category. They even promoted them as a pseudo-SDK for a time! (And maybe gave up too soon?)

Flash-free, Silverlight-less, but full of interactivity and cloud-based applications, Apple just unleashed .Mac upgrade MobileMe complete with “desktop class” mail, calendar, contacts, and photo gallery web apps.

And according to this year’s WWDC buzz, they used SproutCore’s Javascript frameworks to do it? Why?

SproutCore not only makes it easy to build real applications for the web using menus, toolbars, drag and drop support, and foreign language localization, but it also provides a full Model View Controller application stack like Rails (and Cocoa), with bindings, key value observing, and view controls. It also exposes the latent features of JavaScript, including late binding, closures, and lambda functions. Developers will also appreciate tools for code documentation generation, fixtures, and unit testing. A key component of its clean MVC philosophy that roots SproutCore into Cocoa goodness is bindings, which allows developers to write JavaScript that automatically runs any time a property value changes. With bindings, very complex applications with highly consistent behavior can be created with very little “glue” code.

Check out the read link for more on Apple’s use of SproutCore, and how it might just be part of a growing trend for open standards-based web interactivity.

Read

We’ve covered the iPhone Flash saga ad nauseam here, but in an interesting post involving the technology itself, NetNewsWire developer Brent Simmons (via DaringFireball) shares some interesting error/crash logs highlighting the instability-adding benefits of Flash, and the rapid catchup of Microsoft’s copycat, Silverlight:

I’ve said it before — one of my favorite things about the iPhone is no Flash. I will now add and no SilverlightPlugin.

As a web developer who uses Flash routinely, I’ve also come to enjoy its absence on the iPhone (and the absence of like technologies, and even prehistoric kin like animated GIFs), and the amazing increase that absence give to the information over noise ratio. It’s led me closer towards “Web 2.0″-style AJaX for interactivity, and away from the proprietary, and often overkill, that is plugin technology.

What do you think?