D8 conference: Steve Jobs 'didn't want war with Flash'

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said today that the company wasn't interested in starting a war when it chose to exclude Adobe Flash from its mobile devices.

"We didn't start off to have a war with Flash," Jobs said, appearing as a guest speaker at the opening night of the annual D Conference hosted by The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

"We just made a technical decision that we weren't going to put the energy in to getting Flash on our platform."

Jobs said Apple shipped the iPhone without Flash and it wasn't until the iPad that Adobe "raised a stink about it".

"And that's why I wrote, 'Thoughts on Flash'. We were trying to be really professional about this, we weren't talking to the press about it.

"We finally said enough is enough, we're tired of these guys trashing us in the press about this."

Jobs said that Apple had told Adobe that it would include the platform if and when it was "running fast enough."

"Come back and show us," he said he had told Adobe. "Which they never did."

Jobs said Apple has succeeded by choosing the "right horses to ride really carefully" from a technology perspective.

"We try to look for these technical vectors that have a future and are headed up," he said.

"For example we went from the five inch floppy disk to the 3.5 inch floppy with the Mac. Sometimes when we get rid of things like the floppy disk drive in the original iMac people call us crazy.

"Flash looks like a technology that had its day and HTML5 looks like the technology that is really on the ascendency right now."

Photo: Credited to Asa Mathat | All Things Digital.