[sdoowpilihp]

There was a point where Adobe had a chance to evolve flash into a platform for creating HTML sites and applications (much like coffeescript, LESS, or any other intermediate might be). It certainly would have involved open sourcing large components of the platform, which they seemed to be against.

It's a real shame, since the closed source aspect of Flash really led to a brain drain within the community. Flash for many years was the superior platform for making complex web applications, but sadly, it did not have the community and brain trust that more open standards did, like HTML and javascript did. In the long run, this led to serious stagnation with the platform.