While there are real criticisms of Flash in there (which I agree with) I have to chime in on the "he's full of poop" side of this divide. The iPhone could easily let users opt in to using flash, or even give them a nag screen that they have to approve with every flash app they try and run online (that would probably kill flash faster than anything).

But Apple isn't concerned about maintaining open standards any more than I am concerned with ensuring that there is a good cheesburger to be found in Oklahoma (I am from Texas, and we don't go there). He is concerned about controlling the user experience so that nobody does anything on the iPhone that isn't approved by Apple.

The big danger Apple faces is that users could get apps which are not approved by apple. If they had flash, they would have fast and glitzy locally running apps from any website they visited. Apple would no longer get to decide whether the app was acceptable or not and (more importantly) would not get their percentage of any purchase price for something used on the phone.

If you doubt this, then ask why you can't run python on the iPhone. Aside from the fact that you can't download a file and use it in any other app on the iPhone, someone could very easily write pygame based or (the horror) pyqt based apps for the iPhone. But apple says no interpreters. So nobody else is going to have a subscription based (or ad-supported) pygame system for the i-stuff.

Mr. Jobs does a great job of explaining why he doesn't like Flash. But he doesn't explain why he doesn't trust iPhone users to decide for themselves whether they want long battery life or access to farmville on any given day. (Today, by the way, I chose short battery life but full access to all my IM accounts because I am working offsite...that's what freedom lets me do.)