> managers at Adobe and Sun must be kicking themselves
Both tried. As I recall Sun were blocked by Microsoft, and Flash was bundled as standard with Netscape from about 2001 onwards. Steve Jobs killed that stone-dead when he point-blank refused to support it on iDevices.
Adobe AIR beat things like Electron and PhoneGap to market by years. IMHO the issue with Adobe is this insistence on 'open' still having various vary opinionated elements. Adobe Air for example had a lot of good ideas but still attempted to evangelize Flash and ActionScript. I _think_ MS is trying to pivot of that grave now with .NET Core. Time will tell if the Mono-to-Wasm or .NET Core Native projects have legs.
I was so very excited about Adobe Air and wrote a production application with it in 2009.
I _think_ a sweet spot for WASM data processing. The data visualization space should explode once I can with data in the browser at near native speed.
Sun thought that they had something like that with Java Apps ~20 years ago, except they forgot to make installation and UX compelling, and the memory requirements were unacceptable for the time.
For a while before being terminated, Flash got a native code backend.
Admittedly they could be clocked slightly higher if they were larger with better cooling, but they're by no means slow computers.