Accounts of his anti-Adobe rants raise questions about what really motivates them

I have no doubt that Steve Jobs is at least partially sincere when he complains to his staff and the gossipy editors at the Wall Street Journal about Flash, the multimedia platform Apple pointedly refuses to support on the iPhone, the iPod touch and the forthcoming iPad tablet computer.

With his penchant for simplicity and elegance, Jobs may very well believe that the ubiquitous Web animation software is "buggy," a "CPU hog," "full of security holes," "a dying technology," the cause of most Mac crashes, and that the Adobe engineers responsible for it are "lazy," as anonymous sources have reported to Wired, Valleywag and elsewhere.

But ditching Flash -- which generates roughly 75% of the video on the Web -- and replacing it with MPEG-4/H.264 is not, as Jobs claims, "trivial," and I suspect he knows it. Nor would supporting Flash necessarily reduce the iPad's reported 10-hour battery life to 1.5 hours, as he is said to have claimed.

Of course there are other reasons Jobs hates Flash -- business reasons. More