The reaction to the news in the Apple blogging world was swift, and quite negative.
John Gruber, the influential author of Daring Fireball was unusually blunt in his assessment of Lynch. He titled his post: "Exhibit A in the Case That Newly-Hired Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch Is a Bozo, a Bad Hire" and he linked to a Lynch blog post on
When the iPad was launched in 2010, Apple did not support Flash, Adobe's video playing technology. Steve Jobs had his own "Thoughts on Flash" where he explained why he thought it was bad technology and HTML5 was better.
Jobs was right. HTML5 won. It was better than Flash which was a buggy power hogging technology.
Still, Lynch worked for Adobe at the time and so he defended Flash, writing, "We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers. This includes Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry, Nokia, Palm Pre and many others across form factors including not only smartphones but also tablets, netbooks, and internet-connected TVs."
Google has since dropped Flash from Android, and the rest of those companies are out of business, or irrelevant, notes Gruber.
Gruber closes his post on Lynch by saying, "I have a bad feeling about this."
Gruber is typically pretty careful in how he chooses his words to describe people, especially Apple executives. The fact that he's this negative on Lynch is pretty eye opening.
It's also worth keeping in mind that Apple has had a few bad outside hires lately: Mark Papermaster was brought in from IBM to do iPhone engineering and was quickly booted. John Browett was brought in for retail and quickly booted. Will Lynch be another mistake?
For what it's worth, Wired author Steve Levy disagrees with Gruber, tweeting, Lynch was a "loyal Adobe-ite, he railed against Apple power plays. Relax, fans, the guy is a star."