Every time I see Adobe logo somewhere I just cringe a little bit. From the time that you had to have Acrobat Reader installed because most of pdfs created with Acrobat (writer) weren't really compatible with other readers, or that time that everything interactive on the web was in Flash (even our governmental websites for example Social Insurance Institution dropped Flash few days ago).
My SO recently bought Adobe Lightroom and low and behold - you cannot install it on case sensitive filesystem (in 2020) and help page says: "well just install it on case insensitive filesystem". I'm quite surprised that they allow file names longer than eight characters, dot and three for file type...
Might been different a tough question to answer because it's hypotheticals all the way down. There is a different version of history where Macromedia's two biggest products, Flash and Dreamweaver took a different route, and neither died an ignominious death. Flash could have become an open web standard, driven by a programming language that isn't javascript, which we're all now forced to use due to browser support. Instead of using CSS for layout, we could be using something else. The cross-platform smartphone app ecosystem would look a whole lot different if iOS and Android both had built in Flash interpreters.
Does this all sound like a fantasy? It should, because it is. Absent the history of it actually happening and being able to point at that, the question is akin to comparing two sports teams across history, eg the 2014 Golden State Warriors to the 2002 Mavericks and trying to talk through which team would win.
Could an independent Macromedia have been better stewards of Flash than Adobe, leading to a world today where Flash wasn't deprecated? Absolutely. Would it have? We'll never know. Flash had a number of issues that lead to its death today, and it's not clear if an independent Macromedia, with a different internal developer and business culture from Adobe, could have fixed all of them resulting in a different future, or if they even needed to be fixed for that future to happen.
Looking at Adobe's poor stewardship of PDFs, however, it's hard to see positives to Adobe-owned Macromedia and Flash.
Flash could have become an open web standard
driven by a programming language that isn't
javascript, which we're all now forced to use
due to browser support.
Agreed on the impossibility of discussing what-ifs.
Obviously, they could have done anything. =)
Ultimately though I guess what I'm ultimately asking is if there were any hints about how Macromedia would have done things differently, had they remained independent, particularly in the direction of making Flash an open web standard.
