Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at Adobe, has left the company and is “taking a position at Apple,” Adobe has confirmed. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling told AllThingsD that Lynch will join Apple as vice president of technology, reporting to Bob Mansfield, SVP of Technologies.
CNBC was first to report the news. In Adobe’s Form 8-K, filed today with the SEC, the company states:
On March 18, 2013, Kevin Lynch resigned from his position as Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, of Adobe Systems Incorporated, effective March 22, 2013, to pursue other opportunities.
Both Lynch and Philip Schiller, Apple’s worldwide marketing head, worked briefly together at Macromedia —which was acquired by Adobe in 2005. Adobe described Lynch’s official duties thusly:
Focuses the company’s technology innovation across three vectors: multiscreen, cloud and social computing (and) oversees Adobe’s Research and Experience Design teams
Each of Lynch’s primary areas of focus are directly applicable to Apple’s work. Last year, CEO Tim Cook told Bloomberg Businessweek that Apple is “marrying hardware, software and services.”
In 2010, Steve Jobs famously posted his rationale for why Apple did not and would not enable Adobe’s Flash technology on the iPhone and iPad:
Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
It was Lynch who was tasked with leading Adobe’s public response to Job’s post. Lynch referred to the iPhone then as “a recent magical device.” Lynch followed that up with a video interview with AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher.
Image of “Flash Shield” courtesy of linkdb.
