I think their current strategy on the desktop is not so much 'content-protected video' (Flash did that 15 years ago already), but high-end gaming. They have some seriously impressive 3D stuff in the pipeline, which coupled with Air would finally make some good use of Flash as a platform-independent way to create games. But my guess is that it's all too little, too late, and that the market for cross-platform advanced 3D graphics development is pretty small. The really big guys that would make good use of it already have their native engines ported to those OS'es that matter, and the small developers probably don't have the budget to create games that really benefit from the technology.
It's weird to see how Adobe seems to screw up so often, because they really make some very good products. The whole 64-bit Adobe CS for OS X debacle comes to mind, it took them about 5 years too long to transition from Carbon to Cocoa, even though it was clear from the very first OS X version that Carbon was going to be replaced and would never have a 64-bit version.
I think Adobe really believed they could strong-arm Apple on that. I think they were spoiled by Microsoft's dedication to backwards compatibility at all costs[1], and thought that surely it would hurt Apple more than Adobe to let PS languish. I think they were so sure of this, in fact, that they made few arrangements for the contingency that Apple might just call their bluff. So when that happened, they had an uphill battle to fight.
[1] This story comes to mind: http://ceklog.kindel.com/2012/04/18/dont-build-apis/
That wasn't entirely their fault. Apple actually did promise a 64-bit Carbon and included it in developer previews, but yanked it shortly before Leopard shipped.
Yet, they still managed to do it before Apple got around to making iTunes use Cocoa ("oh, the irony", right?). The reality of the situtuation is that sometimes, even for flagship products, even for first-party products, sometimes portability is a critical concern, and Cocoa's reliance on Objective-C makes it very difficult to nigh-unto-impossible to not simply end up with tons of code duplication.
When using Cocoa, you will find yourself constantly needing your data in the form of some random Objective-C classes. Carbon, on the other hand, stores all of its core data structures in C objects defined by a library called CoreFoundation.
This library, CoreFoundation, is something that you actually will find a copy of along with your Windows version of iTunes in the form of CoreFoundation.dll. Along with another few easily ported C libraries, this allowed iTunes to maintain the same networking and storage backends on Windows and Mac OS X.
Recent? I don't use Adobe tools one way or another, but recent is hardly the word I'd choose. It's been, what, over a decade now, or near enough to make no matter[1]. Yes, this starts with Macromedia, but it isn't like Adobe isn't working with a group to build useful tools. Just because they support their own format doesn't mean they aren't supporting other formats.
This doesn't mean they only focused on standards compliance. They are a tools company, and they build tools for people to use.
So, do you really mean HTML?
[1] http://www.webstandards.org/action/dwtf/ - Note the section "Release of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX."
That is true, but on the other hand it looks to me that try to scare developers away by charging them for using it (That includes that they have to open their books, who likes to do that?). I still think they are pretty clueless. Also I wonder why I should use Flash for platform independed game development, steam for Linux seems to be around the corner.
On mobile, users love apps and distributing and supporting them is far, far easier.
Further, flash runs so poorly on mobile devices, and has for so long, that anyone serious about their "premium copy-protected video" jumped-ship for a dedicate app years ago.
So it doesn't matter what Adobe does. No-one is going back to mobile Flash at this point. Providers' app investments have been made, the same source content (h.264 video) is used in both places, and they get far more out of their own dedicated app.
Further, Adobe's money is made via content creation apps. Flash was a means to that end, but they don't need it. They can still make money off production tools, particularly while people still need to maintain a content pipeline that churns out resources that work on mobile and desktop.
Maybe in the cost benefit analysis it would be better to devote time and resources on HTML toolsets.
I do think they really tried, for a while, but it just didn't work.
Adobe employees created Photoshop 20 years ago, and was tremendously successful until Flash died in the last five years.
Flash and Dreamweaver were acquisition s.
Prior to that Adobe's business was based on PostScript, and they developed Illustrator to take advantage of PostScript's capabilities. Then they licensed Photoshop.