… Or at least add him to my daily reading.
My last source of confusion (on this matter, at least) is that people are going after Apple on this at all. Until the iPhone there was never an expectation that phones should either run Flash or be open. A phone is not a personal computer. It’s a phone. All smartphones are just phones. They play by a whole different set of rules. And that set of rules is much longer and stricter than that of a personal computer. No one ever complained that Nokia’s phones weren’t open. Or Motorola’s. Or Samsung’s. Why now is it completely offensive that Apple’s phones should be? Moreover, there are no phones in existence today that can display Flash content because of all the reasons cited by Jobs in his letter. Google’s phones don’t. Neither do Palm’s. So why is everyone going after Apple? It’s just crazy. →
Quick update: About the only thing that has changed since he posted this, I think, is that Google has announced with Adobe that they’re going to get Flash on the Android platform. We’ll have to see how that turns out, but I honestly don’t have high hopes, primarily because touch is not the same as keyboard, monitor and mouse, and I’m not sure Flash content designed for web-on-PC will translate well.
Ruiz-Ade.com 
Fallacies aside, Nokias or Motorolas being “closed” does not make the iPhone any more “open”, so the original complaint still stands. It just should be extended to other makers, not only Apple (according to the arguments of your quote). Apple is not innocent, it’s just that other makers are also guilty.
Moreover, the “offensive” part about the iPhone not being “open” (in stern contrast with old Nokias or Motorolas), is that the iPhone *is* capable of performing the general purpose computation that makes it a de facto “computer”, instead of a simple appliance (a phone). While the iPhone is hardly a pioneer on the subject, it certainly is the most patent example of an IT product designed with capabilities far exceeding those actually provided by it, and artificially maimed by the maker to optimize sells and maximize control over the user.
Older phones simply could’t do what the iPhone could, but didn’t do because Apple didn’t want it to. So Apple superceded the previous incompetency with malice.
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