To take for example banner production. Roughly 50 to 70% of every banner commissioned is spent on creating an animated gif alternative that will be viewed by less than 5% of the visitors that don’t support Flash. That is a very expensive small group, but that is the price you pay if you want to reach everyone and avoid the Blue Brick Of Omission.

Sites such as YouTube and Vimeo face exactly the same problem. They can’t just outright stop using Flash because that would alienate the majority of their visitors. (It will take years before html5 is widely adopted). But in order to reach that small percentage of iPhone (and soon iPad) users, their sites need to be duplicated. Either by creating apps that only function on the iPhone specific platform or use a technology such as HTML5 which is promising, but not yet ready for prime time.

And having to maintain two or three different technologies just to serve up the same content is not only expensive, it also eats up time that would otherwise be used for either innovating or creating better content. We have been through this during the browser wars and I don’t really want to go through it again.

I don’t want some company to control what I can or cant view online. And if they offer no choice, then they themselves become no choice to me, as a consumer and as a professional.

And if the “limited operating system” of the iPad is really the massive problem you think it is, presumably no-one will buy it, it’ll get cancelled, and some other hardware manufacturer will come out with something that you might prefer.