The entire letter is typical of the Jobs rhetoric, a web of lies, omissions and half-truths and I fail to notice any insight at all. Sure, in the opening paragraph, Jobs tries to pretend he doesn't loathe Adobe [1], but in the rest of it it makes sure to push the idea that Apple is some sort of white knight of open standards fighting the good fight against the visionless Adobe who still doesn't get this thing called Web Standards. For example he writes

"HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member."

Notice it doesn't even mention that Adobe is also a member of the standards committee just like Apple? Or how about this gem:

"Apple even creates open standards for the web. For example, Apple began with a small open source project and created WebKit [bla bla bla] Apple has set the standard for mobile web browsers."

You may not know it, but KHTML was pretty competitive, shipping with Konqueror, the default web browser in KDE, and it also had a lot of users including Nokia before Apple forked it and started to add their own code to it, a lot of the times Mac specific and non portable. It also fails to mention that Apple's own contribution to WebKit is far lower than that of KDE's developers, authors of the original codebase and later additions to WebCore like KSVG2, KCanvas, KDOM [2], or Google, the current largest contributor. It's pretty deceiving to claim that Apple just took a "small open source project" and gave WebKit to Google, Nokia, Adobe (they use and contribute to WebKit also) etc to use, and it's extremely deceiving considering the bad blood between KDE developers and Apple caused by the way Apple forked KHTML and managed their fork originally ([3] for an episode of that open source drama).

Anyway, this letter is just an episode in a long and entertaining grudge match between Jobs and Adobe, dating back to the days when Apple's own survival in the holy war against PC\Microsoft depended on Adobe's commitment to support MacOS, which was apparently not enthusiastic enough by Jobs' standards.

[1] Via a review for the recently released Final Cut Pro X, I found this old article about the origins of Final Cut, where Jobs claims

"But a 1998 meeting in which Jobs asked Adobe Systems executives to develop a Mac version of their consumer video-editing program changed his mind. "They said flat-out no," Jobs recalls. "We were shocked, because they had been a big supporter in the early days of the Mac. But we said, 'Okay, if nobody wants to help us, we're just going to have to do this ourselves.' "

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/...

Poor little Apple left to dry by the evil Adobe. Just look at the Wikipedia entry for Adobe Premiere to find out that outside the Jobs distortion field the software was released on Macs from day 1, in fact it was exclusive to Mac for the first versions. By version 3, a less advanced port to Windows is released, and the Mac version continues to be far ahead until... (surprise) 1998 when Mac and Windows versions reach parity and begin being released at the same time. It sure looks like Apple is trying to punish Adobe for giving the Windows peons access to software that was exclusive to Macs until then.

[2] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/07/10/199244/apple-to-adop...

[3] http://blogs.kde.org/node/1049