Since there are so many mobile devices and so many of them are iPhones, anyone building websites will try to steer away from using Flash. So Flash is dying, fast.
I'll call out Steve Jobs on this one. Another good one!
The best they could have done is to completely open source it...frankly it is too late. There are standards worked on that will completely replace it: Websockets, WebGL, WebRTC and so on.
"Incumbent" is a temporary state. "Leader" is a decoration that is assigned dynamically. You stay a leader by siphoning potential energy off of the commoditization of your current golden goose, to set up your next one.
Oh, and open standards trump proprietary defacto standards in the end. Ask Microsoft about that one. (And Apple: pay attention!)
I don't think Steve Jobs necessarily is responsible for this, but that he was aware that it was going to happen. If the iPhone had shipped with a poor implementation of Flash, which was all Adobe was capable of delivering, Flash would still eventually die off. Jobs was just aware that it was worth the sacrifice of political capital to do away with Flash, since in a few years it would be a moot feature.
Apple had a big hand in this, Whilst there was plenty of negative sentiment towards flash before the iPhone etc I don't remember too many people talking about killing it.
Indeed many website owners liked having flash content on their site, it is only in the last few years that developers can point to a growing and lucrative demographic or users/devices that can't consume flash content.
I think it was the hard work of those who made browsers a viable alternative to Flash more than Steve Jobs' nyet. Without their work, not even the mighty Apple could have said no to Flash forever. But still, it was a good call by Steve Jobs, no doubt about that.
He didn't say that.
I think 'pay attention' in the parents' post refers to the stated notion that open standards trump proprietary ones in the end. Parent thinks Apple should pay attention to this notion.
'pay attention' does /not/ refer to the open standards themselves, to which Apple /does/ pay attention. Oh, they do, they do, very much so. For instance, by sabotaging attempts to make Ogg Vorbis the standard for the HTML5 <audio>-tag.
I'll call out Steve Jobs on this one. Another good one!
The best they could have done is to completely open source it...frankly it is too late. There are standards worked on that will completely replace it: Websockets, WebGL, WebRTC and so on.
"Incumbent" is a temporary state. "Leader" is a decoration that is assigned dynamically. You stay a leader by siphoning potential energy off of the commoditization of your current golden goose, to set up your next one.
Oh, and open standards trump proprietary defacto standards in the end. Ask Microsoft about that one. (And Apple: pay attention!)