During a keynote at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Abode Systems’ chief technology officer (CTO) Kevin Lynch said that Apple’s denial of Flash on the iPhone not only hurts innovation, but is also “like
1984 in a lot of ways.”

Lynch’s comment – which basically implies that Apple is back to becoming the “Big Brother,” and refers to Apple’s famous 1984 TV commercial for Mac computer – comes in response to Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ last-week posted note that accused Adobe’s Flash of being ‘closed, unstable, and antiquated.’

Saying that Apple was essentially trying to create a “walled garden around the applications that people use,” Lynch said: “I don't think it's the role of a company to exercise judgment on what people are making. The story is bigger than HTML versus Flash. It's about freedom of choice on the Web.”

Furthermore, talking about “the elephant in the room,” Lynch said that Apple’s unflattering, anti-Flash behavior is comparable to that of the 19th century railroad companies, which largely hindered progress because different gauges of railroad track were used by different companies.

In retaliation to Jobs’ argument that Flash drains the battery life of Apple devices and slows their performance, Lynch reiterated that Adobe has given up on Apple, and would shift its focus on developing Flash for rival mobile platforms, like Google Android, Palm, and the BlackBerry.