Does Flash have a future?

Apple continues to refuse to allow Flash on its iPhone OS based platforms which now include the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. Publicly, Apple blames instability, high resource demands, and the potential for viruses as a reason for keeping Flash of the platform. While these factors are all very legitimate, they aren't the entire story. Flash has become a de facto standard for interactive multimedia delivery. Its continued growth is a threat both to Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft has taken this threat on by promoting its own alternate platform in the form of Silverlight. Apple has decided to go with an open standards approach and push the new technologies surrounding HTML5 including direct playback of H.264 video from HTML5 capable browsers. The animation for which Flash is so famous will also be addressed by CSS3. Using open standards, Apple feels it can take the high ground and get support for a wide variety of developers who prefer to avoid proprietary standards. Of course this rings somewhat hollow as Apple uses open standards in areas where it is beneficial for them to do so, often simply because high quality and actively developed free Open Source projects can benefit Apple just as well as they benefit Linux. In other instances, Apple goes with their own proprietary and highly patented technologies.

While it is commonly thought that Flash is just too big for anyone to bring down, it is actually quite vulnerable, not so much from Silverlight but very directly from HTML5 and CSS3.

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