Apple has amazing clarity and vision toward the future, which puts them ahead of the competition constantly, and for that I'll give them credit. And while I'm not sure how the iPad's going to change everything, as I still very much enjoy keyboards over touchscreens any day, I will say that the next big step is going toward mobile devices that sip power and don't slurp it, and pick & choose how they handle processes, without delaying or going slow, and emit very little heat, compared to the machines of the past.
Adobe Flash does not fall in this vision. Its a general one-size-fits-all solution to run on everything. The problem is, when "everything" includes the small army of mobile devices that has already started to appear in peoples hands, Flash finds itself fading away because it really doesnt even run efficiently on some desktops. Yeah it helped by creating a way that anyone with a browser could watch video, but it decodes in SOFTWARE, which is unnecessary work for a computer thats got the gearing & fittings to do it in HARDWARE, saving both heat & energy. Furthermore, its incredibly unstable. Mr. Jobs talks about how its the leading cause of Mac OS X crashing, and I'll go one more and say that using it on Linux is a complete pain. First, they always leave Linux for last, throwing them a bone when they have to. Second, watching Flash video on Linux is the equivalent of making your computer go running for like 8 miles and then wondering why the battery dies, because if you're on a laptop, forget it. I had an old 700MHz ThinkPad and it could only play one Flash movie if nothing else was running, in Crunchbang (very minimal Linux distro). And the battery would last about 30min, and the battery was still good.
There's other reasons why Flash probably wont make it into the future, but these are the most outstanding IMHO, and Adobe should create something new instead of making people update their Acrobat 3,284 times for no reason or sitting on the CS Suite.
