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by merdreubu 3104 days ago
It was Macromedia that made Flash, not Adobe. Adobe just ignored it and is now killing it.

Edit: Adobe also killed 2 other brilliant Macromedia products, right after acquisition, Fireworks and Freehand.

1 comments

Right. I remembered that Adobe bought Macromedia, but I thought the acqui-kill was earlier. I was getting the story of Macromedia mixed up with Aldus. And actually, Flash came from FutureWave Software, before Macromedia acquired that company.

But Adobe did not ignore Flash. They may have mismanaged it, but they did invest in it, and tried to push Flash into places it does not belong (AIR, and especially PDF). They also tried to turn ActionScript 3.0 into ECMAscript 4.

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

Now that the Flash runtime is becoming banned, Adobe renamed the Flash Professional content creation program to Adobe Animate, and made it able to export to some flavor of HTML5. The content creation is where they make the money, after all.