They should have done it for the benefit of who? They had fantastic success locking everyone into the swf format. Sold a ton of very highly priced software. Got

They should have done it for the benefit of who? They had fantastic success locking everyone into the swf format. Sold a ton of very highly priced software. Got acquired by Adobe, probably in no small part due to this lock in. I'm completely in favour of web openness, and I'm personally stung by the SWF monopoly, but I find the assertion that Macromedia should have given up a huge part of their business advantage just to help general web openness ridiculous.