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1. If Macromedia was still the author of Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days, I imagine all of those products would still be providing

1. If Macromedia was still the author of Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days, I imagine all of those products would still be providing big benefits to web content creators. I genuinely believe that Adobe never understood the value of these products and the communities that formed around them. Adobe as a company didn't know how to foster and grow this half developer / half designer user base.

SXX 6y ago
Adobe failed exactly same way as tons of other proprietary software developers. Instead of embracing open source and leading the industry standard they wanted to keep tight control over everything: standard, runtime and toolset. They was so over controlling so there was whole game development industry where literally every company used Flash for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime simply because Adobe ignored that market completely. If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak of it's popularity they would probably still sell their proprietary tools to so much larger audience.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  In Adobe's defense, they kinda did try that: AS3 was supposed to become JS2/ES4 and they also released a bunch of somewhat-useful documentation on the SWF file format. They even released AVM2 as free software (called "Tamarin") with the idea that Firefox would replace SpiderMonkey with it. The web community stuck it's nose up at ES4 and the SWF documentation was kind of half-assed. Adobe's idea at the time of the HTML5 transition was that they were going to completely replace Flash with the Edge Suite, while Flash Player became an expensive-to-license compilation target for Unity. Hence, the whole "premium licensing" debacle that smacked of "we don't know who our customers are, but some of them aren't using Creative Suite, so let's try and charge them lots of money for things the web can already do".
  - SXX 6y ago
    That's really good points on their open source activity. How they failed with Alchemy and Unity / Unreal integration is another good story. In my opinion it all was just too little too late. They should been investing heavily into open source as soon as Google started their crusade on web with Chrome. By the time WebGL and other APIs became mature everything was over for Flash.
- sergeykish 6y ago
  They could have overshadowed the documents web. No need to extend text/html, let user agent run application/flash. There would be causalities - accessibility, responsive design, ad block (cosmetic and network), personalization (stylus). Yet with still unmatched creativity, maybe with stronger case against native applications (like today fuchsia). World would be different and we would never know exactly how.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Who really killed flash, was Steve Jobs with his decision that flash gets kicked out of the IPad. Adobes evangelists really started running in circles after that. And adobe itself made one stupid management decision after the other. And after they realised they will not get back on the ipads, they abondoned flash. And this, after AIR ((flash for desktop) and Flex (UI Libary) were on its way to become established. Flex was really powerful. I would have loved to still use it, with a open-source flashplayer as its base. But adobe could not get themself waging to do that, so they just let it die.
throw_m239339 6y ago
> and the communities that formed around them The most important thing Adobe completely failed at. The Flash community was a fantastic thing that will never have any equivalent, ever. Macromedia understood the idea of ecosystem. But what business survived being "Eloped"?

SXX 6y ago

Adobe failed exactly same way as tons of other proprietary software developers. Instead of embracing open source and leading the industry standard they wanted to keep tight control over everything: standard, runtime and toolset. They was so over controlling so there was whole game development industry where literally every company used Flash for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime simply because Adobe ignored that market completely. If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak of it's popularity they would probably still sell their proprietary tools to so much larger audience.

kmeisthax 6y ago
In Adobe's defense, they kinda did try that: AS3 was supposed to become JS2/ES4 and they also released a bunch of somewhat-useful documentation on the SWF file format. They even released AVM2 as free software (called "Tamarin") with the idea that Firefox would replace SpiderMonkey with it. The web community stuck it's nose up at ES4 and the SWF documentation was kind of half-assed. Adobe's idea at the time of the HTML5 transition was that they were going to completely replace Flash with the Edge Suite, while Flash Player became an expensive-to-license compilation target for Unity. Hence, the whole "premium licensing" debacle that smacked of "we don't know who our customers are, but some of them aren't using Creative Suite, so let's try and charge them lots of money for things the web can already do".
- SXX 6y ago
  That's really good points on their open source activity. How they failed with Alchemy and Unity / Unreal integration is another good story. In my opinion it all was just too little too late. They should been investing heavily into open source as soon as Google started their crusade on web with Chrome. By the time WebGL and other APIs became mature everything was over for Flash.
sergeykish 6y ago
They could have overshadowed the documents web. No need to extend text/html, let user agent run application/flash. There would be causalities - accessibility, responsive design, ad block (cosmetic and network), personalization (stylus). Yet with still unmatched creativity, maybe with stronger case against native applications (like today fuchsia). World would be different and we would never know exactly how.
hutzlibu 6y ago
Who really killed flash, was Steve Jobs with his decision that flash gets kicked out of the IPad. Adobes evangelists really started running in circles after that. And adobe itself made one stupid management decision after the other. And after they realised they will not get back on the ipads, they abondoned flash. And this, after AIR ((flash for desktop) and Flex (UI Libary) were on its way to become established. Flex was really powerful. I would have loved to still use it, with a open-source flashplayer as its base. But adobe could not get themself waging to do that, so they just let it die.

throw_m239339 6y ago

> and the communities that formed around them The most important thing Adobe completely failed at. The Flash community was a fantastic thing that will never have any equivalent, ever. Macromedia understood the idea of ecosystem. But what business survived being "Eloped"?