Re: He's responsible for Flash as well?!
No, he wasn't responsible for Flash itself. Flash became a the goto framework for interaction on websites and, hence, a money spinner for Macromedia. This in turn led Adobe to buy Macromedia and subsequently improve the video codec, which helped make YouTube popular and eventually end the video codec wars. It also served as the template for a lot of the later development of HTML 5.
Flash was popular as a development environment for designers and Macromedia did the right thing in developing it for them. That the problems of the runtime would come back to haunt it has as much to do with its success as anything else: it was popular then ubiquitous long before it was a target. Nowadays it is an increasing irrelevancy, largely due to the availability of more secure, native alternatives.
Credit where credit's due: Flash inspired a lot of people to develop "for the internet". Adobe has also done a reasonable job in maintaining Flash despite the many security flaws: reasonable in terms of having a plan for regular updates to exploits. Maybe they could have open-sourced the runtime but there might have been reasons against this such as containing licensed code. But by the time Google got behind the HTML 5 ball it was probably too late.
I think I removed Flash from my machines in 2016 but it lives on in Chrome and IE because for some things there still aren't better alternatives.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
