On Thursday, Adobe co-founders and co-chairmen Chuck Geschke and John Warnock followed suit with some thoughts of their own. Their eight-paragraph essay, “Our Thoughts On Open Markets,” mentions Apple only once, but when it does, it is to lambaste the company for its position on Flash, a position the two claim “could undermine this next chapter of the web–the chapter in which mobile devices outnumber computers, any individual can be a publisher, and content is accessed anywhere and at any time.”

I spoke to Geschke Thursday afternoon about the pair’s letter, Adobe’s (ADBE) new “We ? Apple” ad campaign and Apple’s (AAPL) stance on his company’s software. Below, a transcript of our conversation.

John Paczkowski: What is Adobe is hoping to get out of this new “We Love Apple/Freedom of Choice” campaign?

Chuck Geschke: We mostly are using it as a way to communicate with our customers and partners to assure them that we’re not going to change our strategy and to inform the rest of the community of what the pluses and minuses are of not supporting Flash on the iPhone and the iPad. Our customers, a large percentage of them, are the people who generate and distribute information and content, and for them they have one production stream that they use to do that and they’ve gotten used to the fact that we’ve worked very hard to open up the standards that we support so that we can offer them ubiquity of output on all kinds of platforms. So the fact that Apple is precluding that puts them in a tough position because it means that they’re going to have to create that content twice, and that’s not very productive. It’s certainly more expensive than what they do today. And as you know, the content industry is an industry under a lot of cost pressure these days.

JP: Both Apple and Microsoft have said publicly now that Flash has issues with reliability, security, and performance. Do you think those complaints are legitimate?

CG: I think they’re old news. Go to our Web site and read the actual facts about Flash. We enumerate the facts about Flash there as we see them. [Microsoft and Apple] may have a different set of facts that they believe are accurate. It’s up to you to decide. But I will tell you that the Flash version we’re coming out with now–where, for the first time with the Mac platform, we can actually get to the lower-level interfaces–is going to run like the wind. And the same is true on Windows.

JP: Shouldn’t Apple have the right to define the means by which apps for its own platform can be written?

CG: They absolutely have the right. No one says they don’t.

JP: Cross-platform mobile apps tend not to take advantage of native features unique to each device. What do you have to say about complaints that write-once-run-anywhere software results in subpar apps?

CG: Well, people don’t say that about Photoshop. They certainly don’t say it about Acrobat….I’m a little confused about what the real examples of that are. If there’s a problem with the performance of Flash as demonstrated on the iPhone, it’s because we haven’t been able to access the inner layers of hardware and software we need to to provide the kind of performance we can provide on other platforms. But that’s Apple’s choice, not ours. And now, of course, you can’t use it at all.

JP: So you don’t think write-once-run-anywhere is limiting at all?

CG: Not really. I mean there may be certain features in certain environments that you’ll want to do customization for, but the more you go down that road, the more you get the experience of HTML on the Web, where the kind of browser, hardware and OS you use determines what your experience. That’s because HTML is not well codified and standardized and people sort of roll their own.

JP: How much of Adobe’s revenue comes from Flash?

CG: I would share that number if we disclose it, but I’m not sure that we do. It isn’t a huge amount of revenue, but it is an extremely popular platform that all of our apps have the opportunity to exploit when it’s distributed everywhere. Flash tools aren’t the largest piece of our business, but it’s a significant one and obviously we feel it’s extremely important to our customers and partners who want to build third-party apps in an environment where they can, in fact, put them on a variety of devices without having to re-implement them.

JP: So could Apple’s exclusion of Flash hurt Adobe sales?

CG: I don’t think it will have a significant effect. As well as Apple is doing, if you look at the number of platforms out in the market and the number of release of new ones that will occur over the next six to 12 months, it’s going to be huge. That’s a much bigger population, and we’re just focusing on making our technology operate as effectively and efficiently as possible for it.

JP: In his “Thoughts on Flash” essay, Jobs accused Adobe of abandoning Apple. “Apple went through its near death experience, and Adobe was drawn to the corporate market with their Acrobat products,” he wrote. Is Job’s implication here a fair one?

CG: We never abandoned Apple. Apple now seems to be abandoning at least one aspect of our product line right now. No, we never abandoned them. We’ve always ported our apps simultaneously to both platforms. There have been times when Apple has changed its strategy on hardware or on operating systems that didn’t meet our product cycle, so there have been periods of maybe six months where we didn’t keep up with their latest release. But that’s our own business model; we can only afford to re-implement our products at a certain rate.

We have never, ever abandoned Apple and we don’t want to abandon them today. Everything you read in our new ad is true. I myself own probably between 8 and 10 Macintoshes — both laptops and work stations. I don’t buy PCs, I buy Macs.

JP: Why isn’t Flash an open standard?

CG: It is. What are you talking about?

JP: Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It’s not Open Source. Let me rephrase: Why isn’t Flash an open standard overseen by an open-standards body?

CG: As soon as Adobe acquired Macromedia, we openly published the SWF format and removed the requirement that you have a license to use it….No, we haven’t put Flash out to a standards body yet as we have with PDF and Postscript. But I wouldn’t be shocked if we do someday when it makes sense.

With the standards that we have built and made open to the entire world, we’ve tried our best to get them to the point where they’re mature enough so that we’re not doing design by committee. If you look at the amount of time it will take HTML5 to become a reasonably solid platform, it’s going to take a long time because there are an awful lot of vested interests trying to influence its development.

JP: Any thoughts on Steve Jobs’s claim that “Flash was created during the PC era–for PCs and mice”?

CG: What do you think an iPhone is? It’s a personal computer.

JP: One last question. What do you think of the iPad?

CG: I think it’s a neat thing. I personally have no particular interest in it; I’d much rather have a general-purpose computer. I think there’s definitely a market for that kind of product. We certainly know a lot of people that want to produce content for it and a large percentage of them are disappointed that they’re going to have to do that separately from the way they produce content for all the other devices they support.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Adobe to Apple: You Wanna Hug It Out? Let’s Hug It Out!
• Good Luck With That Alleged Antitrust Complaint Against Apple, Adobe…
• Adobe CTO: Flash on iPhone Doesn’t Suck and Apple Knows It
• A Possible Apple Antitrust Inquiry? Nothing to See Here…
• Microsoft on Flash: What Steve Said
• Adobe: We’re Done With You Too, Apple
• Apple to Adobe: I Know You Are, but What Am I?
• So Much for Flash on the iPhone
• Adobe: Flash for Mac Is Getting Better–Really!

“The AT&T and iPhone combo turned in the fastest average speeds–downstream and upstream–of the four carrier/smartphone combinations we tested, outperforming its rivals in more than three-fourths of the cities we sampled,” PC World explained it its study.

“AT&T connected the iPhone at an average download speed of 1259 kbps, and an average upload speed of 215 kbps over the 13 testing cities,” the study notes. “The iPhone clocked download speeds of at least 1000 kbps in more than 60 percent of our testing locations, with burst rates often exceeding 3000 kbps, and we managed to obtain a reliable connection in 91 percent of our AT&T/iPhone tests.”

The PC World study confirms results of a similar 12-city 3G performance study by Gizmodo last year.

A remarkable improvement, although it should be noted that San Francisco is still plagued by reliability issues. PC World found just 55 percent of connections made on AT&T’s network in the city to be successful. Bay Area users can only hope that the additional cell towers, cell site upgrades and increased back-haul capacity the carrier is said to be rolling out will improve this metric in short order.

PREVIOUSLY:

• AT&T: “We’re Closing the Gap” in New York and San Francisco
• Apple COO: Leave AT&T Alone
• If You Think AT&T Has Network Problems Now, Just You Wait
• AT&T 3G Improving–If You Can Get a Signal
• Admitting You Have a Problem Is the First Step, AT&T
• Usage-Based Data Pricing: The Solution to AT&T’s iPhone Problems?
• AT&T Ranked Last in Consumer Reports’ Best Cellphone Service Survey
• Apple Joins AT&T/Verizon Spat With New iPhone Ads
• AT&T Awarded Hug and a Box of Tissues in Verizon Ad Case
• Time to Cut AT&T Some Slack, iPhone Users?
• Thanks, iPhone: 2,000 Percent Increase in Bay Area Data Traffic Since 2008, Says AT&T
• Verizon to AT&T: Do Yourself a Favor and Shut Up
• Frosty’s Winter Litigation Wonderland: AT&T Demands Verizon Pull Holiday iPhone Ads
• Verizon Banishes iPhone to Island of Misfit Toys
• Verizon on AT&T Suit: There’s a Word for That. “Junk
• Verizon to iPhone Users: “Want Five Times More 3G Coverage? There’s a Map for That.”
• iPhone Owners Would Like to Replace Battery, AT&T

Welcome news for long-suffering AT&T (T) subscribers, who recently ranked the carrier dead last in the annual Consumer Reports survey of wireless customer satisfaction. But the carrier’s improvements only apply to cities where additional back-haul connections have been added to support those higher speeds.

Sadly, for New York City and Bay Area residents, neither region qualifies. As AT&T head of operations John Stankey told attendees of a Citigroup (C) conference Tuesday, those cities present particularly challenging density and zoning issues.

“I thought by the time we’d closed 2009 we would be in a better place in New York City than we were,” Stankey said. “But New York City is a little bit of a different animal and it’s a good example of having to scale in this data environment, where not only do we have a lot of capacity issues to deal with but physically there is network equipment and network elements that are needed to be changed out.”

Elaborating, Stankey added, “They just flat-out have hit their capacity levels and we have to replace them with new ones. And as a result of that, those transitions and that work has taken us a little bit longer and it’s been a little dicier than what we had hoped it would be.”

And evidently, the situation is equally dicey in San Francisco.

“Our challenges [in San Francisco] are largely zoning-oriented,” Stankey explained. “It’s a little bit tougher in places in San Francisco to do adjustments to antennas that we need to do in areas like the Financial District, where we had antenna structures that worked really well in a 2G environment. They need to be replaced to support 3G services and it’s just taking time to get the zoning ordinances square to replace those antennas and clean up the portions of the city that we are dealing with.”

Okay. So New York City and San Francisco upgrades are tough going–that’s understandable. They’re both big, tech-savvy markets with high data demands. Still, it’s a travesty that a carrier like AT&T still can’t reliably connect calls in either of them when the company is raking in 80 percent more wireless data revenue than it did in 2007.

Priced at about $36 per user per year, iNotes is cheaper than Google’s (GOOG) Apps Premier Edition offering, which costs about $50 per user per year. And while it might not offer as many bells and whistles (IBM’s 1GB of storage is significantly less than the 25GB that Google provides), IBM (IBM) claims it more than makes up for it in security, reliability and privacy.

“We run the world’s most mission critical systems for banks, telcos and utilities,” said Sean Poulley, IBM’s vice president of online collaboration services. “It’s fair to say we’re pretty trusted….Candidly, Google has shown itself to be weak….There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service. We’re bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition.”

Later today, Perlman–former principal scientist at Apple (AAPL) and the founder of WebTV–will officially unveil OnLive, the online service with which he hopes to upend the $46 billion world-wide videogame market. Seven years in the making, OnLive promises to create an on-demand gaming experience that rivals those offered by dedicated videogame consoles. It’s capable of streaming even the most advanced, CPU-intensive games to television and computer–Macintosh or PC–without lag or a reduction in quality. “We’re providing you with the latest high-end titles, the exact same ones you would see at Target or Best Buy, in the same release windows,” Perlman told USA Today. “But what is really cool is you don’t need any high-end hardware to play them. There’s no physical media. It’s an all-digital platform. You never need to upgrade your equipment at home.”

A compelling proposition. A potentially disruptive one too, if OnLive is able to deliver it with the reliability and ease of use it promises. Said IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon, “It’s a good idea and has potential, but the thing I need reassurance on is being able to deliver this over the network. In games there’s no wiggle room–when you press a button to fire you want to fire,” he said. “But if it works, this could be a disruptive.”

Originally, as GrandCentral, the service gave users a single number that, when called, would ring their home phone, work phone or cellphones, or a combination of phones. Re-envisioned by Google, it adds to this call recording, automated voicemail transcripts that can be viewed online, SMS messaging, conference call support and a means of forwarding problem callers to a “this number has been disconnected” message. Beyond these options, Google Voice offers a means of placing calls within the states for free. And international calls aren’t all that more expensive, two cents a minute to France or China.

A compelling set of features and one that will undoubtedly make Google Voice a formidable rival to Skype. Whether the service is disruptive enough to cause trouble for traditional telecoms remains to be seen. Certainly, reliability and call quality are potential issues. That said, there can be little doubt that the telephone companies are looking askance at the service today.

iPhone version 2.1 contains many bug fixes and improvements, including the following:

• decrease in call set-up failures and call drops
• significantly improved battery life for most users
• dramatically reduced time to back up to iTunes
• improved email reliability, notably fetching email from POP and Exchange accounts
• faster installation of third-party applications
• fixed bugs causing hangs and crashes if you have lots of third-party applications
• improved performance in text messaging
• faster loading and searching of contacts
• improved accuracy of the 3G signal strength display
• repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages
• option to wipe data after 10 passcode attempts
• Genius playlist creation