Why the heck did Apple hire Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch?
“Just hours after word leaked that Apple had poached Adobe’s chief technology officer, the Internet is ablaze with the question of what, exactly, the iPhone maker plans to do with Kevin Lynch,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “Lynch is particularly interesting as an executive choice for Apple because of his close association with Adobe Flash, a product he infamously clashed with Apple over, beginning in 2010.”
“Lynch staunchly defended Flash, accusing Apple of promoting a philosophy ‘counter’ to the web and one that would require developers to target multiple platforms, rather than writing to a common ‘run anywhere’ platform like Flash,” Dilger reports. “He touted the partnerships Adobe had lined up, stating at the time that ‘all the innovation coming from all those companies will dwarf what’s coming from the one company that isn’t participating.'”
Dilger reports, “Instead, Apple’s iOS juggernaut did the dwarfing, obliterating the market for Flash so rapidly that even Adobe’s close ally Google abandoned support for the middleware on Android just two years after promoting Flash Player as a major differentiating feature of its new devices… [Columnist John] Gruber has subsequently written a piece referring to Apple’s new VP of Technology as ‘a Bozo, a Bad Hire,’ citing Lynch’s comments in support of Flash while working for Adobe and tasked with marketing Flash.”
