I have been working with Flex as my daily job since 2005. I've made at least 20 different enterprise apps. All of which are received with "wow, holy cow!" style comments. I make apps that literally can't be developed in HTML, because HTML lacks even some of the more basic features of the Flash runtime.

I agree that you can find dog poo piles of Flex code. Which is why I often end up writing my own. The apps I produce load fast, run smoothly, and have a great user experience.

What inexperienced people assume is that Flash is the cause of badly written Flash apps. It's inexperienced developers that produce badly architected apps that give Flash a bad name. I could write a C++ app that's slower than any Flash app you've ever experienced. But that's not C++'s fault, it's mine. It's so easy produce even a basic app in Flash, that everyone tries their hand at it. Where as in C++, or Java, it's much harder to get a basic app published because of the technology hurdles. So Flash ends up with tons of dog poo piles that are actually published.

Wow, this article is so full of misinformation...

"major platform vendors are increasingly encouraging developers to create rich applications not to be delivered via the browser, but as native, platform-based apps"

Adobe Flash can build both native iOS and Android apps today. Many of the top games in both the iTunes App store and Android Market are made with Flash.

"Perhaps Adobe's biggest problem, however, is that it's something of a relic as developer-oriented vendors go. How many people have access to the Flash runtime is almost a moot point, because Adobe doesn't make any money from the runtime directly; it gives it away for free. Adobe makes its money from selling developer tools. Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"

Adobe Flash Builder is a plug-in to Eclipse! And Adobe's implementation of Flash Builder in Eclipse is one of the best plug-ins I've ever used. It's well featured, has lots of support and documentation, and works well on multiple platforms.

Funny thing, there's no actual HTML 5 in the SlideShare site. Not a single canvas element.

They're not even using the canvas tag; which is the most widely supported and first-out-of-the-gate html 5 tag.

You're correct. There's actually no HTML 5 in the new SlideShare site. It's just HTML 4 and Javascript. They are simply using the HTML 5 badge for marketing purposes.