Most of the arguments against Flash being dead seem to be one of these:
1) Games
2) Mobile apps
3) Video
#1 I agree that flash is better for making games, but how big of a market are games on the internet? It's a 'big' market, to be sure, but how big compared to the number of Flash websites a few years ago? Surely it's a low percentage (anyone have actual stats? I don't know of any). Is the amount of Flash games being made enough to keep Adobe interested in continuing to improve Flash? As the desktop market recedes and mobile devices become more popular with users (and I truly do believe that it will) what will happen to the Flash games?
As for #2 - mobile apps. This could be the answer to the above, but why use AIR when you can get better performance writing native code for whatever platform you are working on? I'm sure it will work out for companies that want to save a few dollars and be able to launch a simple game on many platforms while writing it once, but that kind of development has rarely succeeded in the world. Look at Java apps on windows/osx - they often feel klunky and look ugly and don't support the native UI elements of the host OS (does AIR do this on mobile phones? I'm admittedly not that familiar with it). Because of the history of this area of technology, I'm highly skeptical.
#3 I agree with, and covered this in a comment below. I believe Flash will be useful for desktop video delivery for a few years to come, but will eventually lose to native support.
Games on the internet are massive. We track 100s of millions of hours a month spent playing them.
Adobe's not really killing Flash, what's happening is it's transitioning to a development platform rather than development + consumption platform and that's not a horrible thing - Flash is a great platform to develop in, being able to export mobile apps from it is far more important than being able to play the SWF files on mobile.
Flash on mobile could have worked but there's two reasons it doesn't ... one is purely technical that time and improved hardware would erode, the killer one is consumption - games on websites are just a plain inferior way to play them vs apps, and ads + video + applications are all solved problems. There is no must-have use case as a consumption platform on mobile.
They made the right choice - let Flash become just a development platform and let the output be whatever provides the optimal user experience - on desktops it is (or can be) the Flash Player, on mobile it's apps and HTML5.
1) Games 2) Mobile apps 3) Video
#1 I agree that flash is better for making games, but how big of a market are games on the internet? It's a 'big' market, to be sure, but how big compared to the number of Flash websites a few years ago? Surely it's a low percentage (anyone have actual stats? I don't know of any). Is the amount of Flash games being made enough to keep Adobe interested in continuing to improve Flash? As the desktop market recedes and mobile devices become more popular with users (and I truly do believe that it will) what will happen to the Flash games?
As for #2 - mobile apps. This could be the answer to the above, but why use AIR when you can get better performance writing native code for whatever platform you are working on? I'm sure it will work out for companies that want to save a few dollars and be able to launch a simple game on many platforms while writing it once, but that kind of development has rarely succeeded in the world. Look at Java apps on windows/osx - they often feel klunky and look ugly and don't support the native UI elements of the host OS (does AIR do this on mobile phones? I'm admittedly not that familiar with it). Because of the history of this area of technology, I'm highly skeptical.
#3 I agree with, and covered this in a comment below. I believe Flash will be useful for desktop video delivery for a few years to come, but will eventually lose to native support.