Apple's Jobs' curse proves ineffective against Adobe amulet -

When the spiritual and temporal head of Apple, Steve "Do what I want shall be the whole of the law" Jobs declared that Flash was a thing of the past, many expected Adobe to roll over and die.

In the tame Apple press, Jobs declares which technology will succeed and what will fail. After all weren't Microsoft making tablets unsuccessfully for years? Then when Steve declared that the time was right for a keyboardless notebook with less functionality than Microsoft's tablet, suddenly the fiat came.

Jobs claimed that one of the main reasons that the expensive gizmos failed was because they were trying to play Adobe Flash. He called on the industry to shift to HTML 5 and was even visiting his chums in the media to join his crusade against Flash. To be fair, not that I am usually fair about Apple, he put his money where his mouth was and banned Flash from his gizmos, thus making them largely useless when they try to visit most of the world's sites.

So with all this working against Adobe, you would expect the company to be doomed. After all Steve's word is law.

Only Adobe announced today that it recorded its first-ever billion dollar quarter, beating Wall Street's estimates and forecasting a bullish outlook for its first quarter.

Revenue for the fourth quarter was $1.01 billion, a 33 percent jump over the $757.3 million reported a year ago. For the fiscal year revenue for the year was $3.8 billion, a 29 percent increase over last year's $2.946 billion.

In a year were Adobe should have been reeling from Steve Jobs's assault, when it even had some major security scares of its own, the software giant had done really well.

It looks like Steve does not get everything right, and Adobe and Flash will be around for a long time. If anything all Steve's grandstanding did, was draw attention to Flash and remind people how important it is.

Now countless sales people point to Apple's rival Android tablets and say "it is not an iPad but at least it does Flash". Not sure that level of advertising was what Steve had in mind.