[radley]

I agree - was definitely poor stewardship, but also there was a perceptual problem for developers. Flash was created for designers and artists, the coding part was secondary and thus traditional developers found it extremely frustrating.

The internal team became obsessed with changing it to something more focused towards developers with AS3, Flex, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst. Instead of improving something successful, they tried to twist it into something it wasn't.

The final straw was Jobs, not because Flash was bad but because iOS was extremely locked down. There was no way he was going to share his new platform:

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."

Without iOS, there was no future for Flash (Android was still in it's infancy) so Adobe pulled the plug. Just a few years later Apple will go on to hire Kevin Lynch, former CTO of Adobe, to be VP of Technology at Apple focusing on the Apple Watch.