• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 14, 2010

Don't blame me for mixing my metaphors. It's this damned platform war. It started as an uncomfortable divorce in Steve Job's weird little missive about why he and Adobe grew apart. But the Apple vs. Adobe squabble has broken out into a kind of gang warfare this week where neighborhoods seem to be taking sides. Straight from the front lines (in this case the blogosphere) here are the latest troop movements, as this whole debate takes on new metaphors and heads straight into true weirdness.

Yesterday at Engadget, Adobe put some money behind the vitriol by launching a series of ads suggesting Apple's dismissal of Flash is downright undemocratic. The rich media unit (Flash-based, of course) opens with a "WE heart APPLE" headline that dissolves into a new frame that adds:

We love Flash and HTML5

We love our 3 million developers

We love authoring code only once

We love all platforms and devices

What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web

So there Steve. You are not only anti-competitive, you are a threat to freedom.

At the landing page, Freedom of Choice, company founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschle respond to Job's "Dear John" letter divorcing from Flash with something more like a righteous defense of their principled openness. "We believe..." prefaces a number of points. Lord save us. Uber-geeks as some kind of tech patriots. All we need is Glenn Beck bawling over this on national TV ("I'm sorry, but I just love this open Web so much!")

Meanwhile over at team hulu, something really strange happened. In the morning, VP of Product Eugene Wei posts a blog note about updates to the video player, which added a mess of new features, including 25% more screen size and really cool scene preview thumbnails for smarter scanning. Wei also ended the note with "An Aside on HTML5" that responded to the many queries about making hulu moving to an HTML5 framework to be iPad compatible. In essence, he says that HTML5 is not ready yet to handle the complex back end tasks required for data retrieval and the hulu business model.

Saith Wei:

"We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn't yet meet all of our customers' needs. Our player doesn't just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren't necessarily visible to the end user. Not all video sites have these needs, but for our business these are all important and often contractual requirements."

Now here is where it got really strange. At some point in the morning Wei's blog post was removed. Luckily, a resourceful blogger found it cached by Google.

But then later in the day it reappeared on the blog.

Or was it there all along? Or did someone in Cupertino throw the switch that controls what can and cannot be developed, seen and shared on the Web?

Steve, was that you?