Uhm.

Flash is alive and well, this isn't the "death of Flash" -- it's just yet again a new focus for Adobe. Until they completely abandon all support and EOL Flash I don't think we can say it's "dead". Besides, if Flash dies HTML 5 will be the replacement -- and I shudder to think when that will reach feature parity...

Flash dying would be a terrible thing for the web.

That may be true for now.
But if HTML5 blooms after several years, Flash dying should be a good sign.

The funny thing is, some of the companies pushing HTML5 the hardest, are they people that least actually want an open web.

Apple, Microsoft and to a lesser degree Google, would all love to see the full applification of the web continue, considering all three are platform providers. Why adobe went along with it though, that I don't get, unless they are making boatloads more money off AIR that is. This actually could be exactly it, as developing for Flash freely ( and thus not buying Adobe's tools ) has become even easier. It could be, from a financial perspective, putting money into Flash didn't make a ton of sense anymore.

It's a terrible thing because the Adobe Flash player is a reasonably powerful multi-platform virtual machine / execution environment, that is installed on 92% to 98% of PCs. That's a nice thing to have around.

There is more heterogeneity between platforms on which users are running software than ever before. In the old days you could just write your application to Windows and not worry about it i.e. those linux kids don't pay for software anyway so who cares about them. Those days are over. If you want to write an application that anyone is going to use, you have to think a lot about what platforms to target. Given that that is the truth, it's a strange thing that there's not really a "write once, run anywhere"-type platform that one can target and make a reasonable trade-off between what you can do (or can't do) on the platform and the size of user base of the platform.

Basically, "write once, run anywhere" is a god that failed. If someone was paying me money to write a mobile app tomorrow, I don't see any real options to writing two versions: I'd factor out the the common functionality into a separate module written in C++ and then buy the O'Reiley book on Objective-C and do a native app front end for iOS and a native app front end for android -- in *exactly* the same way that I would have handled the Windows and Macintosh dichotomy in 1994 if I was writing a desktop application and had to support Macs.

This is crazy. Especially given that everyone's been yapping about various virtual machine thingies for the past 15 years. Client-side Java never took off for whatever reason. C#/.Net is Win32 for people who don't like C++ -- not really cross platform. Flash, on the other hand, Flash *actually did* succeed; it took off in the way that client-side Java was supposed to. However, now Apple has killed it because it didn't want Adobe to have too much power in Apple universe, which was a callous and greedy move imho. So, you know, now the new thing is Html5 + Javascript, and we'll see how this one goes. Although doesn't it seem to anyone else like a step backwards?