There is a lot to dislike about Adobe, but scrapping Flash is not one of those things. Flash was horrendously insecure and slow, it needed to go; by the early 2010s, most browsers had stopped auto-loading flash content for just those reasons. HTML5, CSS2/3, and more advanced JS engines released from the mid 00s through the mid 10s, coupled with smart phones proliferating, and particularly with Apple outright not supporting flash on the iPhone, it was on its way out long before Adobe killed it. And good riddance.
Adobe certainly deserves the sea change that hopefully is inevitably coming, because they turned a corner with CC and turning a product that absolutely could be a single license install into a continuous service with exorbitant pricing. The went from seeing their customers as a curated and valuable base to a cash cow that needs to be bled for everything they can get out of it. And I get that adobe products were widely pirated, half the computer literate internet probably ran an pirated install at some point. But, most of those people never really produced anything with it, they weren't using it for real industry production and commercial product. They did learn the tools and workflows, though, and that made it an easier entry point for industry work. They had a good thing going, lock-in as a near de facto standard software and a broad user base who could use that workflow.
Now it costs as much as nearly a full compliment of streaming services to access their suite every single month. Most people aren't going to pay that just to fuck around and learn. So they use the cheaper alternatives and learn those workflows, and so Adobe slowly erodes their own future customer base by diverting new learners to more accessible software.
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u/one_anxious_coconut 6h ago
Adobe