[acdha]

Adobe needed to take Flash seriously as a platform. Instead they neglected it, making it synonymous with crashes and security problems, and they milked developers as much as possible.

I bought Flash once. I found a crashing bug and jumped through hoops reporting it. A year or so later, they updated the ticket to suggest I drop $800 for the privilege of seeing whether it had been fixed. I did not make the mistake of giving them money ever again.

They had such an opportunity to take advantage of a platform with a pre-iPhone deployment in the high 90% range, and they just skimped it into oblivion. What a disgrace for everyone who actually cared.

[kccqzy]

Yes seriously. At that time Steve Jobs was harping on HTML5 and CSS3 being open standards but Flash not. Adobe could have ensured Flash's survival by making Flash an open standard (much like it has made PDF an open standard where the specification is free to everyone) and making Adobe Flash only one of the possible authoring tools, and the Flash Player only one of the player tools. Basically they should have invited the community and other companies to make more Flash tooling while continuing to sell their own. Given how often I see people still paying for Acrobat Pro today, I think this is a good business strategy too.