This is a competitor signalling that they are no longer betting on a Rich (binary) environment in a browser. They see that as a dead-end, and have undoubtedly spent considerable time, money, and effort coming to that conclusion.
But, I agree with you that if they pivot they should be fine. To some extent they're also (smartly) re-purposing their existing tools for native mobile development: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/packagerforiphone/
I'm skeptical that they'll be big in the "good HTML5/JavaScript tools" business based on what they have[n't] done with Dreamweaver, HomeSite, ColdFusion, etc. They just don't seem to have a lot of developer momentum there, IMHO.
If seems like if Adobe plays their cards right, they end up making a lot more money, although they become a lot less prominent brand.
2) Flash is ActionScript, and ActionScript is for all intents and purposes "EcmaScript-NG". JavaScript is becoming ActionScript. Adobe got all the predictions right, and EcmaScript is headed that way (I see type-annotations in your js-future :-) and because ActionScript ~= JavaScript, it would be very easy for them to convert to "HTML5", whatever that might become. This is such a trivial exercise, it's done several times a day, js ports of flax libraries.
3) We have already seen CSS3 "IDEs", and you have GWT, Aptana, etc. It's the "HTML5" scene that's going the old Flash way, by integrating development and tools, projectifying scripts, and becoming more organized.
Exactly, people talk about "flash being slow", but the competence is even slower when they try to make what flash does well(drawing vector shapes videos).
E.g when the OSS community tried to make animated svg or flash videos, they discovered their performance was simply awful compared to flash(the two guys that created it were not idiots after all).
MS tried with silverlight not to do difficult things with vectors like flash does, and use hardware acceleration at the maximum level so nobody notice how poor their performance is. The same strategy of metro on win7 of "not trying to do what computers are not good for(translation: our employees don't know/don't want to do the hard work it takes to compete with flash, as computers improve we try to make the minimum effort, and use marketing to compete) "
Care to elaborate on this? Do you have a personal account on the origins of Flash? Would love to hear :-)
I know Lynch was there from the start, but who are/were the coders?
FWIW, for much of its documentation, Adobe refers to the EcmaScript specification. In fact, Flash instructions map 1:1 to EcmaScript specs, including the type conversion and promotion algorithms.
What do you mean "javascript doesn't compile"? if you mean it doesn't have a native ahead-of-time compiler for an existing physical processor, well, that's not a language problem but a community/effort problem :-)
Re: compilation...sorry..that's exactly what I meant :-]. As far as I know, you can't open a prompt in a Flash app and code AS on the fly like you can in Javascript. I don't consider this a problem...I actually prefer JS to AS.
That's funny, I was arguing exactly the opposite recently:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1798679
(yeah, that "bigthingism" thing is one part Flash :-)
At the same time, Microsoft realized that like Flash, Silverlight will never achieve universal penetration, hence why developers are reluctant to use it on the web. Microsoft, seeing Adobe having similar issues and spats with Apple think, hey, what if we bought Adobe and put all the Flash engineers on H5.
Just a thought.