Adobe CEO Says, Apple's Dominance in Tablet Market Soon to End

The CEO of Adobe Systems, Shantanu Narayen, thinks the era of Apple's dominance of the tablet market will soon come to an end.

What you saw with smartphones hitting an inflection point with Android, you'll see it again with tablets, he said in a conversation with Walt Mossberg at the D9 Conference in Palos Verdes, California. There will be another 20 tablets that will come by the end of the year that will push the industry in different directions.

He also said Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Research In Motion (RIM) are the two companies to watch in the tablet market.

Narayen also made it clear that the feud over Adobe and Apple is absolutely done at this time.

He mentioned that the argument was never really about the technology itself but it was more of business model that led Apple to not adopting flash on their devices.

Steve Jobs has said the reason for not adopting flash was that it caused the device to crash too much. However, Narayen thinks otherwise.

It's a business model issue, and it's about control of a platform, he said. It's control over the App Store that's at issue here. We allow people to author once and get as wide a distribution as possible... if you build in Flash, you can run the apps on other platforms.

Narayen also said that Flash is only a small part of the company and where Adobe makes its money will be through application tools along with their solutions.

We are so excited about opportunities we have. We're focused on that, he said.

Adobe is expecting to have 130 million phones running Flash by the end of 2011.