Competition doesn’t mean that Adobe is doing “something wrong”, it may mean the opposite. Adobe had too much control over rich media on the web and that’s scary. HTML5 will be great but won’t completely replace plug-ins. Did Microsoft create Silverlight because they couldn’t do what they wanted in Flash or because they saw a huge business opportunity to compete with Flash who has little competition and relies on other platforms to be successful?

“We are not a platform company, we are a creative experience company”

Isn’t this what they tried with Apple Apps? The Flash plug-in wasn’t welcomed so they created an IDE to develop native iPhone Apps. In other words, they’re no longer “Flash” but something completely different. I saw part of CS5 that could export to HTML5 as well. Would you still consider the exported HTML5 as “Flash”?

Flash and Silverlight are similar technologies but owned by very dissimilar companies. Microsoft can afford to solely focus on Microsoft platforms (Windows, Windows Phone 7) because they already own a large market share. Silverlight is immediately successful once bundled with their platforms. Microsoft doesn’t want Silverlight to work on iPhones because that only strengthens their competition. Adobe can’t do this because they don’t own platforms.