Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 11:32 pm

Why did Apple hire Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch?

By Daniel Eran Dilger

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.

No Flash in the pan

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.

Tensions between the two companies grew, particularly after the iPad appeared without any support for it, followed by a devastating essay written by Steve Jobs that attacked Flash from multiple angles, including its performance, impact on battery life, its faulty security record, its degree of openness as a technology, and even its core value to the web, given the large library of iOS apps and superior alternatives to delivering video and animations on the web that existed by then.

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.

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."

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.

Is Lynch a bozo for supporting Flash?

Apple's ability, less than three years later, to woo Lynch away from Adobe speaks volumes about the resiliency of both parties. It's not yet obvious what Lynch will be doing at Apple however. As columnist John Gruber recently tweeted to former Apple executive Jean-Louis Gassée, "What’s your theory? I’m at a loss, honestly. Makes no sense to me."

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.

However, Flash isn't the only project Lynch has worked on. He has roots in developing software titles for the Macintosh back to his college years, and his bio (still hosted by Adobe) cites early work in the mid 90s developing user interface elements at General Magic, a portable computing company Apple spun off in 1990 to focus its efforts on the Newton Message Pad.

Lynch also "designed the user interface and developed the first Macintosh release" of Frame's FrameMaker publication layout software (later acquired by Adobe) as well as Macromedia's Dreamweaver, one of the original graphical desktop web development tools (which was also acquired by Adobe). At Macromedia, Lynch served as "chief software architect and president of product development."

How Flash threatened, and indirectly helped save, Apple

Additionally, Lynch isn't the only Apple executive to have promoted Flash in a former life. Apple's current senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller was formerly Macromedia's VP of Product Marketing, back when the company bought Flash from its original developer FutureWave in 1996.

The next year, Schiller left Macromedia to join Steve Jobs at Apple. But back at Macromedia, a series of products were vying for the company's attention, ranging from print tools that directly completed with Adobe, to a fledgling new video editor named KeyGrip developed by Adobe's former Premier creator Randy Ubillos, to new web-centric tools like Flash and Dreamweaver.


Macromedia caught a big break when Microsoft agreed to distribute Flash with Internet Explorer 5. That gave Flash a rapidly installed base even as Microsoft worked diligently to thwart the progress of Sun's Java and Netscape's web browser as competing threats to Windows, and as Microsoft worked to derail Apple's QuickTime as the medium for distributing web videos.

Aided by Microsoft, Macromedia's Flash rapidly took over as the web's preferred method for distributing video, animations and interactivity. Because Flash was closed and proprietary to Macromedia, no open community could foster any real threat to Windows via web apps, at least not for nearly another decade.

The growing popularity of Flash led Macromedia to focus on web development tools, inducing it to nearly abandon KeyGrip. Apple, noting the importance of salvaging one of the last major products to be build around QuickTime, stepped in and acquired the project, eventually selling it under the name Final Cut Pro.

The success of Final Cut Pro in helping to sell PowerMacs to a new audience threw Apple an important lifeline. Additionally, in hiring Ubillos, Apple again became a significant software applications developer, churning out titles like iMovie and making new acquisitions that led to the development of Logic Pro, GarageBand and a series of other Pro Apps and iLife and iWork titles.

By 2005, Adobe decided to stop competing against Macromedia and instead simply acquired it, citing Flash as central to the $3.4 billion purchase. It's no surprise why Adobe began staunchly defending its key asset once Apple released its first iPhone two years later without Flash support, and as it subsequently watched iOS grow in stature at the expense of Flash among mobile devices.