I upvoted, I agree that Jobs was lying, but I disagree with your conclusions. The browser's language is a natural monopoly. Flash did one thing - animation -

I upvoted, I agree that Jobs was lying, but I disagree with your conclusions. The browser's language is a natural monopoly. Flash did one thing - animation - really well, and everything else badly. Simply the inability to bookmark a location inside a Flash presentation meant that you could never use Flash to write your whole site - it was always going to be blobs of Flash on top of a fundamentally HTML structure. Once we, the programming world at large, saw with Gmail what could be done with HTML/JS/CSS, the writing was on the wall for Flash. (And also Flash was insecure; and there was no way to throttle poorly-written Flash applications running in the background on some random page, so very quickly the smart kids would only enable Flash on-click.) Logically, there was no need for Flash to exist. Everyone saw pretty soon that all the facilities Flash had should be put into JS, which has the additional huge advantage of being able to manipulate the DOM. Adobe didn't help it particularly with some fumbling, but they weren't ever going to win that battle, and they got out of it quite gracefully when it comes down to it.