None of us should think we know what Steve Jobs said exactly in that town hall meeting. I’ve read that his statements were taken out of context and the wording changed (see Gruber’s blog).

The overall effect of the altered statements is to make Jobs sound harsh and unsympathetic, traits which Apple bashers are quick to latch on to.

Undoubtedly, the Linux, Mozilla, and Adobe communities stand to gain by pushing this distorted view of Steve Jobs.

First, my thoughts echoed Will14′s while I was reading; this is more of a stream of consciousness than an article. I understand where you wanted to go with this piece, but you seemed to have crafted a simplified version of the old “corporations are bad, monopolies are worse” argument. The problem is your thinking is flawed when it comes to for-profit corporations:

“… The issue with the vast number of corporations is that they are profit driven entities whose charter is to bring financial reward to shareholders… “

There is no issue with companies being driven to make a profit, and by stating that as a fact you betray the rest of your argument. Corporations aren’t some giant single entity, they’re a collective group of individuals working towards a similar goal(s). And while tax laws in the US might seek to label companies as individual entities – for the sole purpose of collecting additional taxes on those “evil” profits – the reality is corporations pay no tax, we their consumers do. Companies simply produce a product or service consumers want; they deliver to market and sell at a price that enables them to produce more of their product or continue offering their service while ensuring they can pay their employees, overhead, taxes and end the quarter with a profit for their investors (read: shareholders).

There is nothing insidious about corporations, but since individuals can affect change and steer a company’s goals you could have made the argument that some companies can appear “evil” based on the decisions made by their executive board or CEO. Instead you leave the impression that for-profit companies in general are bad, but Google – which is a for-profit company – really isn’t in the same category because they do some altruistic work on the side. Sorry, that is a false premise as most for-profit companies participate in various charitable works in their community including supporting local arts venues and schools. To say that Google isn’t “evil”, as Steve Jobs suggests, is probably accurate (we really don’t know his exact words or the context in which he made them at the Apple town hall) however I would suggest that any company’s CEO would view a rival competitor’s actions or an uncooperative supplier as potentially harmful and hence consider them in a negative light.

As for Flash, you’re right it’s not dead, but I think the future of the Flash platform is currently being shown off at Lee Brimelow’s The Flash Blog in the form of the new CS5 Pro iPhone API.

It’s funny that you say that web should have “power balance”. That is the exact opposite of Google’s goal. Their goal is that every piece of information on the web goes through their data centers. This will lead to information favoritism like it has already. Unless you are prepared to do some leg work, the truth is what Google’s top 3 results say. Adjust those results a bit and you got a lot of people who form opinions based on the information you gave them. Don’t think this is possible? Google just made huge PR stunt by refusing to censor results in China. Now tell me how were you able to tell in the first place that sites were missing or results were odd with censored keywords? Can you see when Google manually adjusts results because of somebody gamed their algorithm? Nope.

And regarding your comment about Google’s employees. Well of course it’s all goody good over there. It’s not the employees, they are brilliant and obviously working great with current way of doing things. They help spreading “do no evil” message which makes it easier to do “necessary” steps to put the pieces in place to ensure monopoly over certain things. Individual puppets never know what the puppet master does. Larry & Sergey are pretty much powerless if the majority of the board votes for something so their thoughts really don’t matter.

As an aside, did you even bother to read the Wikipedia page on “The Selfish Gene” that you linked to? You might want to remove the sentence in question, as it doesn’t add to your argument, and only serves to bolster a popular misconception that is used to trash Richard Dawkins.