I am not a Flash developer. But with the exception of this past year, I've gone to Flash in the Can conferences and loved viewing what the Flash community has d

I am not a Flash developer. But with the exception of this past year, I've gone to Flash in the Can conferences and loved viewing what the Flash community has developed. There are some really beautiful works of art, proofs of concept, games, and even user interfaces developed in Flash. That said, the only true mass market commercial successes involving Flash are solutions for which equivalent alternatives exist or are very very close to existing. HTML5 solves the video dilemma that Flash was a nice, elegant solution for. In 2004 we were stuck in the quagmire of "Click here for QuickTime, here for Windows Media, or here for RealPlayer". It had a nice 5 year run but now an alternative exists. IMHO, Flex is Adobe's last stand. Until recently AJAX user interfaces have been a complete pain to deal with. For the record, I prefer the HTML/CSS/JS approach, but implementing an interface using any of the existing frameworks save for SproutCore or Cappucino is a completely different experience to what Flash/Flex developers are used to. Once frameworks like SproutCore and Cappucino truly get mass market acceptance in the developer community (e.g., probably in 5 years time when MS comes full circle with ASP.NET implementing a sane implementation of web forms only using the MVC approach) I think Flash will die. Apple is correct in the same way they were correct about the death of the floppy disk. They're about 5-7 years ahead of the competition and until then you'll have people complaining about the lack of Flash just the same way you had folks complaining that an iMac didn't ship with a floppy drive in the year 2001 (long after Apple ditched it and long after they were appropriate for sharing files).