This has been a very interesting change in Hacker News. Back in 2010 when I first learned about it, I was coming from Slashdot. And for me it was a (refreshing) surprise that people here were not anti-paid software, anti-business, etc. After all, it is a forum within a VC firm that looks to fund startups to make a profit. The discussion was more pragmatic.

Somehow nowadays the group think has kind of changed into what Slashdot was 10 years ago. Which is funny, since the objective of YC has not changed.

The software isn’t the issue. The lack of an open standard for content presentation is.

This is not to claim that what we have isn’t less than ideal, but the fundamental problem with Flash is not the authoring tool itself, but that it effectively monopolized the space.

The problem was that it was the only option and Adobe just wasn't committed to being a good software development shop so when you found a bug you were stuck living with it. I did a modest sized project a decade ago where we kept hitting this cycle:

1. Find a bug in the Flash IDE where something basic (e.g. the debugger) crashes or doesn't work in an obvious, easily tested manner.

2. Report it under the paid support plan (hey, that's what we're paying for, right?) with a straight-forward test case

3. A year later, get an email telling you that a new paid upgrade is out and could you pay another $800 to have the privilege of testing whether the problem is fixed?

Because Flash and it's tooling were proprietary, the format is now dead and the content created in this format is becoming inaccessible.

For as rough as PDF tooling is, flash is even worse.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with it. I'm just pointing out that there is a significant hurdle that doesn't exist with HTML.

On the other hand adobe ist sucks up money.