Flash isn't a open alternative. It's closed. So I'm not sure what direction you would like to see them funnel their "aggression".
Let's put what I said in context.
MacinDoc's said this;
"if Apple does not aggressively push HTML5 and Javascript over Flash, then the transition from Flash will happen much more slowly"
I said this;
"Apple is only doing what's good for their business. It would be nice if their aggression were actually for open alternatives, but that's not the case. Flash is online video, gaming, and advertising to name a few. Everything Apple wants complete control of on their iDevices."
You must not have lived through those times then. Or at least it was doubtful that you were buying Apple equipment. Apple was UNIVERSALLY DERIDED for omitting the floppy disk from their computers. Both by the industry in general, and by Apple pundits. You should've heard the wails. I can still remember them now. USB based floppies were nearly non-existent at the time, and there were still lots of people whose workflow centered around having a floppy drive. Sneaker-nets were quite often the order of the day. ZIP drives were coming into use, but were hardly widely adopted. They were a lot more expensive than USB flash memory drives are today.
The wailing and gnashing of teeth is very reminiscent of the Floppy drive omission.
I recall some ruckuses about Apple dropping Floppy drives, but nothing like what you're referring to.
I'm almost 40 btw, so old enough to remember the seventies and things like using a tape to read and write data.
I used ZIP drives regularly back in 96. I even had a Jazz drive. The game company I worked for sold most of their titles on CD-ROM at that time, most software was moving to CD, because it was a cheaper means of delivery.
And on the pricing of ZIP drives, they were affordable, especially when compared the price of hard drives and alternatives like the Syquest drives at the time. The price for a 100 megs was a good deal. I didn't make much money early on in my career and I could afford ZIP discs and the drives.
For reference. I bought my first CD rom in 1993 or it was 94, I bought my first CD burner back in 95. My first CDR-W in 97. My Beige G3 333 had an internal in Zip Drive, as did the various Macs I was provided at the marketing company I worked for starting in 98. These formats overall were superior to the floppy disc and available for years prior to Apple dropping the floppy drive.
Regardless, omitting the Floppy drive is not the same as dropping Flash. Floppy discs were not a threat to Apple's business plan. They were truly out dated and really only useful for delivering files like small drivers or patches -- which the internet remedied. We still had the option to use them on our Macs, this is not the case with Flash on Apple's exclusive devices. They don't want you or I to use Flash on their iDevices, because it would be a means to bypass their ecosystem, their control.
It isn't that Flash is obsolete, it's that it is overly heavy for viewing video. Flash is useful for all sorts of other activity, but it's just silly to have to load a plugin, ANY plugin to view video these days. The industry needs to move away from using Flash for everything just because it is there, towards a model where we are using the right tool for the job.
The primary reason reason why Flash has been so heavy for video playback on the "Mac" when compared to Quicktime as an example, is "Apple."
Apple withheld the API required to access the GPU for hardware decoding from Adobe. For HD video this is absolutely necessary. My DP G5 2.5Ghz required almost all of both procs to playback 1080p at 24 fps. When Apple first introduced H.264 support for Quicktime, it did not support the GPU. Why doesn't anyone else recall this? Quicktime has't always been so GPU happy. It's why the first generation Intels were shown to use way less CPU than the iMac G5s, as they could offload video to the newer ATI GPU, something the iMac could not do.
Anyways, now that Adobe has access to the API, there's Flash Player Gala, which was released less then a week after Apple made the API available. It offers a HUGE improvement for properly encoded h.264 content given the Mac has one of Apple's 3 supported GPUs and is running 10.6.3 or later. OK, this is related, but why has Apple limited support to only 3 GPUs, when every single Intel Mac shipped supports hardware decoding via the GPU for h.264? Why don't they allow support under even 10.5? I'm asking this, because it baffles me, it doesn't make any sense.
On the PC, Flash has had hardware decoding since 2008 and it supports a wide variety of GPUs, even under older OSs... Go figure. Ge, I'm glad my Unibody 17" is supported by Apple, but it sucks that they completely dropped support for my Aluminum 17". Yes I'm bitter about this.
There are of course examples of bloat created by inexperience, but it's a small part compared to not having access to the GPU on the Mac side.
Now for video playback via a plug-in being silly, not really. Flash is still really the only way to deliver video to a wide range of devices. It works on a much wider range of machines and browser than any other means. The HTML 5 video tag on the other hand is quite limited in its penetration and is at the mercy of the browser. It only supports a few of them at the moment and doesn't work well on older machines. There's also still no clear winner on which video format to use, so what works fine in FireFox via the video tag, doesn't work on an iPad. Or what works in Safari or Chrome, doesn't work in FireFox and so on. A plug-in is really the only way to guarantee consistency and with Flash being a standard, it's been the best choice. Quicktime on the PC is a plug-in btw and a bloated one at that.
It's a plug-in for Chrome and FireFox on the Mac. If not for plug-ins, we couldn't watch WMVs on our Mac via Flip4Mac -- Which for reference is owned by Microsoft.
I completely agree on what you say about using right tool. It's why Flash became so popular. Back with player 7, when video was a bit more mature on it, it offered my clients a means to view a video in the browser, then by request I always added an option to download a higher quality Quicktime or WMV. This eventually changed, because Flash's quality improved, especially when Adobe added support for h.264 2 years back. Anyways, lots of rambles.
