Surely darwinian principles say that if mobile devices start to overtake desktops in terms of man/browsing hours, then the relevance of flash decreases because it’s not energy or platform-efficient to try to stuff Flash into a constrained platform with such a huge variation of capability, and the web itself stops using flash so much, turning to other technologies for the same outputs, but which are embedded into the devices themselves by the device or OS manufacturer (this ties into the “piece of pie” stuff you’re talking about too) – possibly with hardware acceleration available only to them and not to Flash.

Ultimately Flash was just a waypoint. Like lots of overweight, bloated software platforms (yes, I don’t like flash at all!) its lifecycle is in the decline now. Let’s give it a good send-off, it served well while HTML / DOM / javascript etc caught up.

RIP Flash for mobile – you never really fitted, so let’s move on to using something better suited.

(Here is mine about HTML5 and Flash: http://bit.ly/5bH1uG)

Adding to that: it is good to stir things up. I agree for other reasons that Flash is going to loose the game if they keep on going like the past decade.
Simply put: almost 14 years later we are still running all rendering in Flash over the CPU while the GPU is left unused – having crappy memory management over assets you use and thus crippling development of software via Flash and making the RIA hype they started in 2004 into a failure.
Main reason: running a Flash app gobbles up all your resources where native and HTML are more modest.
So: “Adobe – if you want to be a front runner – what the fuck are you doing now?”

The Flash mobile team seems to be picking up parts. Memory management and better hardware support seems to be on the list now. By teaming with the Flash core dev team, the new 10.x player should become faster and better.
Still I think it will be miles behind what other parties are achieving right now. See Unity3D. Also the WebKit developers seem to be kicking things forward using openGL and stuff natively.

As for the “open web” in general: as long as there are so many differences in implementations as there are browsers, the more rich possibilities for building web apps remain an unfulfilled promise like “better performance in Flash”.

In your two posts: why the emphasis on flash banners and “skip intro’s” without spending the same amount of words on flash sites which are surpassing that limited use? Where is the balance there according to you?

http://developer.openplug.com/

if adobe strategies bother you so much, then why dont you keep your blog with all of those things that you say that cocoa and mac have instead?

Just wanted to say, I loved your comment. It’s a rather shallow world-view indeed that can manage to see things in such stark black and white (I rather envy your ability to do so.)

Where in my article did you read that I don’t like Flash? Was it the penultimate paragraph where I state that I’m excited about using the iPhone export feature in Flash CS5?

I’m also glad you have discovered that a coin has two sides. This is definitely progress (have you told Dr. Chamberly yet, she will be very pleased to hear it). And, although I’d hate to rain on your parade, a coin also has a third side: the edge. Think about that sometime (but slowly work up to it, we don’t want to blow any fuses!)

Finally, thank you for your wonderful suggestion as to what I can do with my blog. After a protracted period of strenuous soul searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m going to keep doing what I like with my blog for the time being. In the meanwhile, maybe you can give us a link to your own amazingly creative blog so we can learn about the creative ways in which we could be using ours from a true master.

Use your blog to something creative instead.

First its Free.
Its Lightweight.
Its fast.

Sure it doesn’t have any timeline tools, but for what I was trying to achieve I didn’t need them.

Indeed, I used to try and figure out where Adobe were making money from Flash, and my conclusion was… they weren’t. They were making more money milking Photoshop tools, not Flash.

Adobe needs to take a hard look at Microsoft’s VS IDE, and start looking after their developers more before MS Expressions takes off. They haven’t gotten the grasp of Graphic Design Tools yet (which Adobe also have a good experience with) but when they do, together with VS, they’ll be steamrolling over Adobe (IMHO).