Adobe has never been a platform company, yet it felt a need to power forward with Flash. I’m sure that early on there was a serious vision of dominating content delivery over the web, but sometime after 2005 — just as HTML5 technologies were emerging, and ironically right around the time of the Macromedia acquisition — it became a burden. Between the money it paid and the money it had since spent, Adobe’s management seemed unable to just let go. MBAs often call this “escalation of commitment”. It’s now 2011, and only the delusional can pretend that things haven’t changed. After today, everyone at Adobe can exhale and right the ship.