This news.com story details a bold Steve Jobs poke at Flash, Adobe’s ubiquitous web content delivery technology.

Jobs used the Apple shareholders’ meeting to publicly dismiss the the full-blown PC Flash version as “too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. He then went on to describe the mobile version–Flash Lite–as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

That’s an unusual–albeit refreshingly frank–way to talk in public about a business partner. Give Jobs credit for speaking his mind, although I very much doubt Adobe appreciated his candor.

That jolted me into looking at where Flash stands today.

No iPhone Flash Support

Flash didn’t debut on the iPhone, and it looks like it’s not going to be part of what many say is the World’s Best Phone for some time, if ever.

YouTube is Moving Away from Flash

Months ago, in an effort to support the iPhone and AppleTV, YouTube began the massive task of re-encoding its millions of videos in the much-more “open” H.264 standard.

It’s Still Big, Bloaty, Proprietary, and Update Hungry

And resource-hungry: watch your processor activity move up fast when you use it. Adobe/Macromedia (Flash’s former master) had years to make it run fast, but instead they chose to add features, a conundrum that is the result of one of the Laws of Programming: you can have features or light weight, but not both. Flash is a 5MB download.

That’s not to say that right now we’re seeing Flash in decline. Its installed base is absurdly broad. But if it’s not on revolutionary devices like the iPhone, we’re probably seeing the early writing on the wall. And that wall is graced with the likes of RealPlayer, Quark Immedia and other names on it.