I just wish people wouldn't criticise Adobe for making these difficult (but correct) decisions. They see the writing on the wall as clearly as everyone else. HTML5 and WebGL is what the rest of the computing industry is moving toward, and Flash is long in the tooth and the wrong development model for the future of the web. Flash served its purpose as a stop-gap techology until the web caught up. It's time to move on and we should thank Adobe for not prolonging this transition any further.
Heck, I'll go so far as to praise Adobe. While it's easy to "see the writing on the wall" from out here, history seems to say that it's often really hard for companies with dominant/historically strong positions in a market to see that revolution before it completely passes them by... I think Adobe has been more quick to change than many large/dominant companies in tech and other industries in years past.
Everyone is better off with Adobe on the "same team". They were trying to swim upstream and they knew it. The web dev world was marching forward with or without them and I'm glad they made the difficult but correct decision to embrace what is clearly the future.
Despite the widespread hatred for the Flash runtime it's almost universally agreed that Adobe makes great tools to create Flash things, and now we have them making those tools for the web. Which is also widely acknowledged as a giant hole in the modern web dev process. This really is a good thing for almost everyone as far as I can see.
I'll second that. Most of the time, major transitions happen through the death of the companies promoting the old models, and the rise of successful ones promoting the new models. Worse yet, quite often the old companies have enough power to strangle the new models for a while. Always nice to see a company actually listen to where people want to go and help them get there; they might just manage to survive the transition.
I agree, and it's unfortunate that the web hasn't actually caught up yet. Uploading files via the browser, working with sockets, and consistent video / audio playback are still seriously crippled in the current browser landscape. I hope that these features may finally improve across all browsers now that our universal crutch has begun throwing in the towel. I still think it's a bit too soon.
Note to mention the infamous JavaScript cryptography and it's problems, and it happens that Flash 11 introduced a secure random number generator for crypto.
