Steve Jobs seems to be really vocal about his opinion of Adobe Flash. Apparently Jobs termed Flash as a dying technology and suggested the Wall Street Journal to move away from it. iPad’s lack of Flash support would certainly be a natural question thrown at Jobs during demos to media outlets, and it seems that he is bouncing off those questions with bold statements like “we don’t spend a lot of energy on old technology”. Flash is said to have compatibility issues with Mac and Jobs discontent rises from the security holes and CPU heavy nature of this technology.
Ever since, Apple declared with the iPad official, the race for some killer content tieups is on. Steve Jobsis said to be personally demoing the iPad to large publishers and trying to get the best content in place for launch day. The success of the iPad is largely dependent on the content tieups, and that can be the only thing Apple can do to better the competition. With or without FLASH, the content on the iPad would have to be optimized for the 9.7″ screen-size and iPhone OS.
Given the attitude of Steve Jobs toward Flash, it now seems highly unlikely to me if iPhone OS 4.0 would support Flash. Fingers crossed on multitasking 🙂