Steve Jobs, taking words.

Apple held an event yesterday where they announced, among other things Mac OS X Lion and new Macbook Air models. Those are interesting and get people excited about products in the way that sometimes seems like only Apple can, but I noticed something else when I watched the keynote video last night.

When Jobs introduced the new Macbook Air, he was explaining the new flash based storage hard drives. Rather than referring to them as flash drives, or solid state drives, he kept calling them simply, flash. I’m sure you are well aware of Apple’s tiff with Adobe about their software Flash. Apple believes that, as opposed to Adobe’s proprietary Flash software, h.264 and HTML5 is a much better way to deliver video and dynamic experiences on the web.

It seems like Jobs, almost petulantly, is trying to repurpose the word ‘flash’ in the consumer electronics context. Normal companies would note how much the word flash is associated with Adobe’s Flash and rather than risk brand dilution or confusion, try to differentiate their product. Apple goes the opposite way, and tries to take the word flash for themselves. Like I said, it’s almost petulant or vindictive, a big ‘fuck you’ to Adobe, but I kind of love Apple’s self confidence and take-no-prisoners attitude. After doing whatever they want and mostly succeeding for the last 10 years, they’ve probably earned that attitude at this point, but, I don’t know man, bold.?