I don't think Flash is shit canned if it wasn't acquired by Adobe.
While it was Macromedia it was no threat to established players, neutral ground if you will.
Adobe was much more relevant during that era and as such the acquisition painted a target on it's back.
There exists an alternate universe where Macromedia stayed independent or was acquired by a party like Mozilla interested in openning up the Flash standard. We would be writing frontend "web" code in AS4 or AS5 by now in a fully tricked out IDE that would support code, design and animations in a single interface.
Instead we have the steaming pile of garbage that is Javascript, the one surviving attempt to make that better (Typescript), CSS that is now tortured beyond recognition, no good tooling for building animations or highly interactive interfaces etc.
Flash was a scapegoat to kill the old web but also to ensure that the burgeoning App Store/Play Store would rule mobile instead of something more accessible and cross platform.
I don't think Flash is shit canned if it wasn't acquired by Adobe. While it was Macromedia it was no threat to established players, neutral ground if you will. Adobe was much more relevant during that era and as such the acquisition painted a target on it's back.
There exists an alternate universe where Macromedia stayed independent or was acquired by a party like Mozilla interested in openning up the Flash standard. We would be writing frontend "web" code in AS4 or AS5 by now in a fully tricked out IDE that would support code, design and animations in a single interface.
Instead we have the steaming pile of garbage that is Javascript, the one surviving attempt to make that better (Typescript), CSS that is now tortured beyond recognition, no good tooling for building animations or highly interactive interfaces etc.
Flash was a scapegoat to kill the old web but also to ensure that the burgeoning App Store/Play Store would rule mobile instead of something more accessible and cross platform.