So Steve Jobs is a jerk — keep it up, dude!

Steve Jobs is a jerk — so here are seven things he can do not to be a jerk: Lay off poor little Adobe, blah, blah, blah. The blogosphere is full of suggestions and criticisms about how Jobs should do his, well, job. I have a suggestion for him, too: Keep it up, dude.

Like him or not, Jobs has done a great job, and the events that have ticked off much of the tech press lately have to do with a couple of fairly gnarly incidents: the tiff with Adobe over Flash, and the case of the purloined iPhone. But if you give either incident some thought, it becomes clear that Jobs was doing what an Apple CEO has to do: keeping control of the platform and the message.

By delivering a consistently good experience to users, Apple has gained market share and driven earnings. By keeping control of the message and, yes, of leaks, Apple’s product launches generate enormous buzz. You can’t buy the kind of PR Apple gets for free. Can you say the same for Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer?

Apple controls the platform In a perfect world, Apple and Adobe would get together, sign a peace treaty, and as Tim Gunn likes to say, “make it work.” Then we could have Flash on our iPhones, iPads, and Macs, and life would be good. But that’s not going to happen — and I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.

Controlling its platform has always been Apple’s distinguishing characteristic. Google, on the other hand, takes the opposite point of view and has turned Android development into what my colleague Galen Gruman called a “demolition derby.” (Yes, I know Android phones outsold Apple offerings in the last quarter, but so did Windows — and that doesn’t include the plethora of giveaways that pumped up Android’s numbers.)

“Google wants it both ways,” says Michael Gartenberg, a partner at the Altimeter Group consultancy. “They want the perception of being open and the idea of being able to support everyone, but they also want their own vision for the hardware and the platform,” he tells me. As a result, device makers and developers are confused, customers are disappointed, and — worst of all — the Android platform is fragmenting.

New phones with different versions of the Android operating system come out with amazing frequency, leaving users confused about what apps will run on which handsets. That doesn’t happen with the iPhone or the iPad. Download something from the App Store and it will work — period. It may be silly or useless, but it works.

Could Apple make the iPhone OS development process more transparent? Of course it could. The approval process for applications can be obscure, and there is real confusion about the question of permissable iPhone OS dev tools and APIs.

Do I miss some videos I’d like to see on my iPhone? Sure, I do. On the other hand, when Jobs wrote that Flash is a resource hog and is responsible for a big percentage of Safari crashes, he was right. Users don’t want to recharge their iPhone more than once a day, and anyone who has navigated the lunatic incompatibilities of Windows software and hardware should be glad to avoid that kind of torture on Apple’s mobile products — even if the price is missing out on some content.

Apple controls the message It’s no accident that people line up for hours the night before a new iPhone or iPad goes on sale. In part, that’s due to the fanatically loyal user base. But then there’s the buzz and the frantic, sometimes fawning, media attention lavished on Apple.

Consider the iPad launch. Major and minor media alike fixated on the product for months, writing breathlessly about every new rumor and jumping to many a conclusion based on scanty evidence. (I was guilty of that myself.) I have no idea if Jobs is paranoid and churlish, but I do know that by keeping details of the iPad secret, the buzz was all the louder.

Yes, that can lead to excess, and Apple has come down awfully hard on publications that manage to ferret out company secrets. I’m not defending those actions, but I am defending Jobs’ decision to keep product details close to the vest. Why? Because it works, and from a business point of view, you have to support that.

I’m reminded of how little the press liked San Franciso Giants slugger Barry Bonds, even before the steroid scandal. I have friends who are sports writers, and I know that he didn’t treat them well or respectfully. As a journalist, that bothered me. But as a fan, I couldn’t care less about the feelings of some newspaper’s beat writer. Bonds was fun to watch, and that brought me to the ballpark. He delivered profits to the team, so management correctly supported him, despite whining from the media.

Then there’s the Gizmodo editor who got his hands on a prototype of a next-generation iPhone. Yes, it bothered me that the police raided Jason Chen’s home office. However, he may well have broken the law by purchasing what was, in effect, stolen property. (It’s a crime in California to sell found property without attempting to return it to its owner, and that trumps the state’s shield law that protects journalists from revealing their sources.)

Jobs didn’t issue the warrant — a judge did. And that’s why the cops seized his computers and other materials. Was Jobs wrong to complain to the police? Not at all. The prototype phone is valuable intellectual property, and the company has every right to protect it.

If all of that means Jobs is a jerk, I don’t care. I don’t want to go out for a beer with him and probably wouldn’t vote for him — or other Silicon Valley honchos — if he ran for office. But he’s delivering great products and great shareholder value, and that’s what counts.

I welcome your comments, tips, and suggestions. Post them here so all our readers can share them, or reach me at bill.snyder@sbcglobal.net.

This article, “So Steve Jobs is a jerk — keep it up, dude!,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com. Read more of Bill Snyder’s Tech’s Bottom Line blog and follow the latest technology business developments at InfoWorld.com.