Adobe may have had massive resources, but either they are incompetent, or didn't spend any time on flash.
Multiple times, single devs working solo, wrote full flash interpreters over a few month.
Adobe just doesn't know what they're doing. Look how they cratered cold fusion too.
They also had a security / license daemon, lmgrd. What a joke, used MAC addresses for license issuance, was buggy, could be defeated with a simple ifconfig command.
Why would people be using Adobes insecure implementation if multiple random guys wrote replacements in a few months? The answer is that these of course are not the complete, bug for bug backwards compatibility monstrosities that Adobe Flash Player is.
Adobe is competent in some regards, but seemingly not in others. Flash was riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities, so in this regard Adobe seems incompetent, or lazy at best. But the flip side to this coin is the reason flash became so popular; artists and designers saw in it a tool that scratched their itch well, not knowing or caring about the technical shortcomings. In this particular regard, making software that designers and artists like to use, Adobe seems to have a track record of competence.
This is the same company that assigned a whopping 0.5 FTE to porting the Director plugin from OS9 to OSX, which subsequently took years and killed the platform.
I would not make the assumption that Flash development was well resourced. Which is a shame because despite the bad rep it was an amazing tool for creatives.
Multiple times, single devs working solo, wrote full flash interpreters over a few month.
Adobe just doesn't know what they're doing. Look how they cratered cold fusion too.
They also had a security / license daemon, lmgrd. What a joke, used MAC addresses for license issuance, was buggy, could be defeated with a simple ifconfig command.