This is insanely far off base. When Flash was ascendant there was no open web, not on the horizon, not even as a glimmer in the milkman's eye. HTML/web developm

This is insanely far off base. When Flash was ascendant there was no open web, not on the horizon, not even as a glimmer in the milkman's eye. HTML/web development was a nasty brutish mess with each browser extending each "standard" however they wanted, while the w3c specified stuff none of the vendors were even considering implementing. Then Flash came along with a single API, a single consistent model for interactivity, actual graceful degradation, video and audio that worked, etc. And content worked the same way across browsers and platforms. And it was much, much better than HTML/JS, so web development justifiably got its ass kicked for a few years. THEN, gradually, the standards committees and the browser started standardizing and implementing everything Flash had validated. That lead to the open web.