Steve Jobs’ attack on Adobe Flash was childish. And have you noticed during iPad and iPhone presentations that Jobs conveniently includes sites with Flash components conspicuously missing? I remember the NY Times site in Mobile Safari with missing Flash elements on the right column.

The Apple CEO’s mission is subtle and insidious. He has decided on your behalf that you don’t need Flash, and he’s doing all he can to move that agenda forward.

Regardless whether you champion Jobs or roll your eyes, I can’t help but wonder if he’s right.

Whenever I run across a Flash-enabled site on my iPhone, it’s more of an annoyance toward the site owner than Apple. My kids visit Flash-enabled game sites, like Disney and Fisher-Price. These sites would offer miserable experiences on an iPhone or even an iPad. So that is really a moot point. What I hate is when I visit a restaurant site on iPhone and there’s no alternative to get the information from the site other than using Flash. Shame on the site owner for that. The result: Lost business for them.

How dedicated is Adobe to Flash? Palm has had built-in support for Flash in webOS since very early 2010. The Flash plug-in for that platform is still MIA with no announcement for when it might be available. The Android plug-in is also not available. So what’s up with that?

Jobs claims that Flash is buggy. He might have exaggerated claims to support this, but in my unscientific experiences I must agree. Leave a Flash Web site open in a browser too long, and it will start to become unstable or perform poorly. You have to restart the browser to fix it. It might not be fatal, but it is buggy. Kinda like Java Runtime, but that’s a whole other rant.

I say we get rid of Flash over the next couple of years and embrace newer technologies, like H.264 video and HTML 5 feature for greater interactivity.