Apple's mighty iPad will eventually be unseated from its reign as the dominanttablet by devices running on Android, Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Nayarensaid Thursday in a conversation with Walt Mossberg at the D9 Conference in Palos Verdes, Ca."What you saw with smartphones hitting an inflection point with Android, you'll see it again with tablets," he said. "There will be another 20 tablets that will come by the end of the year that will push the industry in different directions."
Nayaren also said that the feud between Adobe and Apple over running Flash on iOS devices is over. Flash famously doesn't run on iOS and last year Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Nayaren's company out, saying that Flash hasn't "performed well on mobile devices." Nayaren shot back, blaming Apple for Flash's difficulties. On Thursday, Nayaren contended that the public skirmish has been squashed, and it wasn't essentially about the software.
"It's a business model issue, and it's about control of a platform," he said. "It's control over the App Store that's at issue here. We allow people to author once and get as wide a distribution as possible… if you build in Flash, you can run the apps on other platforms."
Nayaren boasted that there will be 130 million phones running Flash by the end of the year. But Mossberg contended that he had "yet to see a single [phone] where Flash works really well."
While the Adobe CEO asserted that "Flash is a really small part of the company," he said he's thrilled to be working with the software on non-iPad tablets, likening himself to "a kid in a candy shop."
"I think the community is vibrant," he said. "I'm really excited."
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