Tough luck, Steve.

Following up on my April Fools’ Day prediction, yesterday’s news brought the not unexpected fact that Apple’s market capitalization now exceeds that of its old nemesis Microsoft. Given that the fruit company has a great CEO and the other one has a clown in the corner office, that’s not all that surprising. What is amazing is that Microsoft’s shareholders have stood idly by for over a decade of this buffoon’s rule, a period which has seen Microsoft’s market capitalization more than halve from a peak well in excess of $500 billion.

Ten years of Ballmer and Jobs

Certainly, innovation never darkened Microsoft’s doors, and its insistence on purportedly open systems (open to what? phishing? viruses? security holes?) has much to do with its demise, clown CEO apart.

So it’s intriguing to watch the public spat between Apple and another poorly run company, Adobe, over the use of Adobe’s Flash (which Adobe claims is ‘open’) on Apple’s mobile devices. That, per El Jobso, is strictly verboten. Now Apple’s claims that Flash is slow and full of security holes and chews up battery life may well be true. But it’s also not lost on me that Apple’s ban of Flash allows it to maintain strict control over its mobile devices and, last I checked, the profit motive is alive and well at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

So make of it what you will but don’t expect to see Flash sites on your iPad.

Until now.

Check yesterday’s journal and you will see that I am now running the LogMeIn remote desktop on my iPad and it allows me to view Flash sites just fine via my desktop HackPro. As an example, here’s what you get if you dial in the estimable Jill Greenberg‘s site on the iPad’s Mobile Safari:

Flash No Go from El Jobso on the iPad

Now dial up the site using LogMeIn and all is sweetness and light:

Flash on the iPad

And you get the best of both worlds. The remote Flash site cannot infect your iPad and you can see it just fine.

By the way, the stock chart, above, from Yahoo Interactive charts, is rendered using Flash. So yet more power to this iPad toting investor.

A note on desktop settings for LogMeIn:

Here’s how I have Energy Saver set on my Hackpro desktop:

This switches off the displays after a period of no use, but never allows the computer to sleep, thus allowing remote access at any time from anywhere.