Adobe held back everyone from the web to desktops. I created the Arora web browser and countless times had 3rd party people put it on embedded devices only to turn around and ask me how to get the flash plugin working. I had no answer but to send them to Adobe and pray that they were using x86 and Adobe would be even interested in helping them and that the fee for helping wouldn't bankrupt the company.
Flash helped keep all of us on x86 more than people realize. The arm port was always a second class could you even imagine ppc or mips? And the idea of some other more radical arch? Forget it, Adobe would laugh at you for even asking. How many Linux users choose 32bit x86 (this for the OS that seems to work on everything!) for years because they knew that flash would work?
When I heard that news about its death I celebrated. I drank a beer. I would have sung a song if I was any good. While we knew it was coming having it actually set in stone was nice. The era of the web requiring flash is coming to an end and we can start to move onto interesting solutions and interesting hardware knowing that we wont have to grovel to one company hoping they will pity us and only charge us millions for a product that kills our batteries and pegs our cpu.
Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and not of my employer.
