Bitt, you're still trying to put words into my mouth and that's what I (always) have the biggest problem with.

For me personally, iPhone OS without Flash is better than with Flash. Same as Mac OS. But that's not what I'm trying to extend universally and not at all what I've been saying in this thread. I'm taking myself out of the equation and talking strictly of public acceptance of the (i)platform.

You can debate all you want, but the market has already shown that Flash does not matter. If it did, to even half the degree you seem to go on about, then the lack of Flash would be on the average consumer's tongue and it would be affecting the sales of Apple's iPhone OS based products. Those products are selling like hot-cakes to Mac users and non-Mac users alike.

I'm not here to argue. Frankly, I'm all for a good debate, but none of this is debatable. It's all moot. The fact of the matter is that Apple decides what they want on their platform. And the fact is that the market is eating it up. There's nothing to argue about there.

Remember, I'm not saying that an iPhone with Flash would do any worse in the market. Debatable is whether the iPhone would have even higher sales figures with Flash.

Now, if you want to argue the merits of Flash, that's something else entirely. Frankly, not something I'm very interested in. You might want to argue about WHY Apple doesn't have Flash, and that I've already commented on numerous times - mostly ignored with a few exceptions.

Here are some mistakes in your last post.... Hulu is coming to the iPad and iPhone with a dedicated app. Whether or not Hulu has much longevity is truly debatable. The iPad may save them, because things haven't been looking so hot for them. Also Hulu is US-only, so for many people it's irrelevant.

A lot of video served using Flash is encoded in H.264, the same codec used in the HTML5 standard video tag..

Flash video represents the majority of Flash content only on video-service sites. Everywhere else it's ads. Period. Full stop.

At the top of your post you said that "in a few months" other phones will support Flash. I normally interpret "a few" to mean 3, so we'll first see if Flash is available in full at that time on other handsets (I won't hold my breath) and then how that affects the public's buying patterns.

Here are my predictions. Flash will not be available in 3 months. When it is available, it won't be installable on many handsets, including Android sets it's supposed to be designed for. Android 2.1 (latest release, but hardly new) won't be available on some handsets until the end of the year, Windows Phone 7 which ships at the end of the year won't have Flash either. Flash performance is going to be shite on these platforms. Flash interaction is going to be crap as well and you'll see a lot of frustrated complaints. Lastly, once all these other handsets have Flash, iPhone is still going to whip them in the market. "Has Flash support" is pretty much a wasted bullet point in a commercial. Ask any of your non-techy friends what they think about Flash.

In fact, if Microsoft is smart, they won't allow Flash on Windows Phone 7 at all. At least not if they want to build out their native application list. My advice to Adobe is to start and/or continue working on standards-based tools and frameworks - CSS, SVG (hey Adobe, remember SVG?), HTML5 (et al.) and Javascript. A bunch of Flash can be run via Javascript as has been already demonstrated.

Here's another interesting read (obvious to some ppl): http://iansamuel.com/essays/progress-of-the-platform/