Let's Go to the Videotape: Before Adobe and Apple Went All Gosselin on Us!

It’s quite a feat, but Apple and Adobe are actually making the fighting between Kate and Jon Gosselin look tame by comparison.

To recap:

In February, BoomTown paid a visit to Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch to talk about the software company, including its brewing war with Apple over its popular Flash video technology.

In essence, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had called Adobe’s flagship software crap.

Indeed, after Apple (AAPL) introduced the iPad tablet in January without Flash Player technology, which Apple also kept out of the iPod and iPhone, Jobs dissed Adobe (ADBE) as “lazy” at an employee meeting.

Also, said Jobs, the company had let Flash become a buggy security nightmare and resource hairball.

During my interview, Lynch soft-pedaled the tech tussle and promised that Adobe was working hard with Apple to resolve the issues, as any tech couple might.

Unfortunately for Lynch and Abode, the conflict got a lot worse yesterday, when Apple went all Jon Gosselin and escalated the battle by adding new rules for developers that freeze out Adobe.

As MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka noted:

“Apple is preventing Adobe from using a tool that will port applications created in Flash to Apple’s iPhone and iPad operating systems….Adobe has been pointing to that workaround as its answer to Apple’s anti-Flash campaign, arguing that developers could create programs that work on most of the Web as well as Apple’s platforms. Now it appears that Steve Jobs and company are forcing developers to choose: Our way or no way.”

And Adobe was forced to acknowledge the potential damage of the Silicon Valley battle in a regulatory filing yesterday:

“To the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed.”

You think?

At times like this, it’s a good idea to look back at where it all went wrong, so here’s the video of the interview I did with Lynch about the way they were.

(I’m asking him for another, natch!)