I’ve been deriving secret glee from Steve Jobs’ repeated slams against Adobe Flash. Although I have a lot of friends who are hard-core Adobephiles, I have to admit I’ve always quietly loathed the company’s products. I always found the interface of two of their flagship products – Photoshop and Illustrator – immensely counter-intuitive, and the software itself ridiculously expensive. As a web developer, I’ll also never forget the sneering contempt of a lot of Adobe-centric print shops when bringing them files that weren’t in their beloved .ai, .eps, or .pdf formats. Their most pervasive products – Acrobat and Flash – have also brought me agony in a variety of other ways. Who hasn’t struggled at some point extracting content from or converting a PDF file? Or had one crash while loading in their browser? One of many stories I could share about Acrobat would include the time I had a friend working for the Peace Corps in the Ukraine (Hi Ben!) who needed some simple training materials for classes he was teaching. He could find the material from free legitimate sources in PDF’s, but guess what? The security settings that some nitwit had added made it impossible to print them from the print menu. Enter the questionable legality of the Advanced eBook Processor, which made a joke of Acrobat’s security and encryption and allowed me to free up the restriction for him. Don’t sue me; I did it in the name of international cooperation and education! And Flash? Although it was an amazing product when in the hands of Macromedia (the company that developed it), Adobe acquired Macromedia and rolled their two coolest products (Flash and Dreamweaver) into their Evil Empire of Creative Suite (pick up a copy today, it’s only $2300!). Dreamweaver became much more buggy and cumbersome, and Flash? It’s a browser-crashing system hog riddled with security holes. When you consider the fact that Flash security issues effect THE ENTIRE INTERNET (Adobe claims 99% market saturation of Flash amongst web users) and the recent report that malicious PDF files comprised 80 percent of all exploits for 2009, you can probably stop worrying about the Internet Explorer facilitated China/Google hacking; Adobe’s buggy and vulnerability-riddled products could bring down western civilization as we know it.