Apple recently announced a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone. It also announced support for users of Microsoft Exchange by licensing Microsoft’s phenomenal ActiveSync software. If you are unaware of ActiveSync, it’s the faceless software that pushes email from an Exchange server down to a plethora of email clients, including Outlook on the PC and on Windows Mobile devices. Apple also announced that no announcement regarding support for Adobe Flash Player 9 would be forthcoming.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t believe they’re unrelated. Here’s my thinking.

First, Microsoft has worked tirelessly to promote Windows Mobile as a Blackberry killer. It’s been at the battle for a decade. Microsoft scratched and clawed its way up to #2 in the market, only to be knocked down to #3 in less than 6 months by the iPhone. To concede defeat to the iPhone and allow iPhones to access Exchange is a huge blow to Windows Mobile and everyone working on that team. I was in a board meeting the day the iPhone SDK was announced and the 2 Windows Mobile + 1 Blackberry users in the room immediately announced “That’s it. I’m finally getting an iPhone.”

Second, Microsoft is gearing up for a huge battle with Adobe over the next frontier of web apps - rich internet applications (RIA). Web 1.0 was about HTML and CSS. Web 2.0 was about AJAX. Web 3.0 or whatever it ends up being called is about RIAs. Adobe’s Flex Builder 3, Flash and AIR have emerged as the most mature and viable platforms for RIAs. Microsoft has made dramatic progress with Silverlight and wants desperately to win this battle. The winner of this effort - either Flex/AIR or Silverlight will likely enjoy for the next decade the equivalent of what .Net provided Microsoft for the last decade.

So my bet is the deal that got done between the Steves (Ballmer and Jobs) looks something like this: Microsoft licenses ActiveSync to Apple for the iPhone and in exchange Apple agrees not to support Flash on the iPhone. We won’t know whether I’m right or not for a while yet. If Silverlight support for the iPhone is announced within the next 6 months, then I’ll be strongly convinced that some kind of deal was struck last month when the iPhone SDK was announced by Apple. Then again, if Flash 9 support is announced, then I’m clearly wrong.

Let’s hope I’m wrong. I’m loving the iPhone. But like desktop versions of Windows and OS X, it needs to open it to allow it to run both Flash and Silverlight.

What do you think? Was a back room deal struck between Apple and Microsoft to artificially keep Flash off the iPhone?