Adobe's fifth column was Adobe. The entire management structure, top to bottom.
The thing that actually killed Flash wasn't the iPhone, but the Premium Features nonsense they tried to pull a few years later. Adobe saw Unity trying to add Flash export and found a way to lock it behind a revshare[0], but it pissed off so many Flash developers that they backed down. In revenge they cancelled AS4 and FPNext work that otherwise would have been a good opportunity to bring Flash to mobile devices in a way that didn't suck.
I suppose you could throw all of that on Kevin Lynch, but it's not like he continued sabotaging the Apple Watch after-the-fact. I suspect it's more the overall system that Adobe was: an engine to buy up other people's products and extract revenues from them.
[0] Specifically, you could not use both AS3 domain memory (Flash's answer to WASM) and Stage3D (Flash's answer to WebGL) at the same time without having a digital signature from Adobe in your SWF that they would only give you if you opened up your books to Adobe and paid a portion of revenues out of them to Adobe.
The thing that actually killed Flash wasn't the iPhone, but the Premium Features nonsense they tried to pull a few years later. Adobe saw Unity trying to add Flash export and found a way to lock it behind a revshare[0], but it pissed off so many Flash developers that they backed down. In revenge they cancelled AS4 and FPNext work that otherwise would have been a good opportunity to bring Flash to mobile devices in a way that didn't suck.
I suppose you could throw all of that on Kevin Lynch, but it's not like he continued sabotaging the Apple Watch after-the-fact. I suspect it's more the overall system that Adobe was: an engine to buy up other people's products and extract revenues from them.
[0] Specifically, you could not use both AS3 domain memory (Flash's answer to WASM) and Stage3D (Flash's answer to WebGL) at the same time without having a digital signature from Adobe in your SWF that they would only give you if you opened up your books to Adobe and paid a portion of revenues out of them to Adobe.