While it made sense to ardent followers of the tech industry, to the average person it was just impenetrable industry speak.

Flash, the software made by Adobe, has been a fillip for the Internet for years. In the early days of web browsers, which couldn't play video or do fancy graphics, Flash appeared as an almost miracle cure. It worked in all browsers, and let designers build graphically rich, sophisticated websites.

It was used by YouTube to play the one billion or so videos viewed on the site a day (the number is now three billion) and there were even web competitions for the funky sites designed in Flash.

But it had its detractors, most notably Apple, which railed against the way it hogged system resources, crashed browsers and chewed battery life on its computers. Apple said it caused the most crashes in its own browser, Safari, which personal experience can attest to.

Despite appeals from iPhone users, Apple steadfastly refused to support it on their smartphones.

"Flash was created during the PC era - for PCs and mice," Steve Jobs famously wrote in April 2010.

"Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low-power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards - all areas where Flash falls short."

As he argued: "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content."

Adobe hit back, with CEO Shantanu Narayen calling it an "extraordinary attack" and blaming Apple's operating system.

As it turned out, Jobs would be proved correct when Adobe announced earlier this month that it would stop working on Flash for mobile phones. Instead, it will focus on a new technology, Adobe AIR.

In the meantime, a newer technology has appeared - called HTML5 - that is being used not only to play videos, but to design more functional websites, and is better suited for displaying on the smaller screens of cellphones.

It is a key driver in our new interconnected tech world, as Jobs concluded, somewhat ironically: "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices [and PCs too]."

Jobs may have been right, but it's more a demonstration that new technology eventually trumps the old - for which cellphone batteries everywhere are grateful.

• Shapshak is editor of Stuff magazine