"I think it's pretty peculiar that Adobe would announce such a regressive tax,... even if you created the SWF yourself (using tools like haxe), you'd still have to pay the tax."
I disagree it is 'pretty peculiar', I think it is 'pretty obvious' why Adobe has done this. After years of growth and dividends and success, they have gone through a decade of sideways motions where they are resorting various and sundry cost cutting moves to keep their stock afloat. They have 'good enough' disease.
That is the disease where computers and their products which run on those computers have become 'good enough' and their customer base isn't rolling over every 12months to pony up an upgrade fee. One of the interesting ways to see this effect is to look for sales of technical books about older versions of a particular software. When they are still selling well it is because those folks are using the 'old' version rather than upgrade.
Given the pricing model Adobe doesn't have a good way to capture that market. They have aggressively been trying to shut down re-sale of older versions on Ebay and elsewhere but the courts have handed them a couple of set backs too because their licenses do actually allow it.
So they have a product, Flash, which they have already said is 'dead' [2] in that its future is maintenance only, and so they perhaps figure, what the heck, lets get some money out of it before it goes.
While what you say is true, I disagree with you in tone.
Adobe makes money from Flash by selling licenses to the tools. During the long period of platform growth, developer community growth and turnover helped maintain profits through new license sales. Now that the Flash community is shrinking, that revenue is not sufficient to maintain the profits that will motivate Adobe to fund continuing development of the platform. This is a business, after all, not a nonprofit like the Apache Foundation.
Meanwhile, you have companies like Zynga making profits from software built on the Flash platform disproportionate to the number of Flash licenses they purchase. Zynga owes much of its success to the high market penetration of the Flash player, which makes its social games extremely accessible to its non-technical core users.
It's reasonable to place much of the blame for Flash's decline on Adobe for failing to maintain the quality of the Flash Player and for underestimating the shift to mobile/tablets. In light of those failures and what must be rapidly falling Flash tool sales, Adobe has made a decision to change the revenue model for Flash so that they can continue to profit from the platform.
"It's reasonable to place much of the blame for Flash's decline on Adobe for failing to maintain the quality of the Flash Player and for underestimating the shift to mobile/tablets. In light of those failures and what must be rapidly falling Flash tool sales, Adobe has made a decision to change the revenue model for Flash so that they can continue to profit from the platform."
100% agreement. Going from a infrastructure support model to a rent seeking model. This will hasten the abandonment of their platform as historically rent seeking has been antithetical to supportable business models in users of the technology at hand, especially if there is no FRAND agreement in place for the technology.
Adobe's last decade was far from bad, it was actually pretty great[1], and they did it under fire from both Apple and Microsoft. Not only that, Microsoft Expression Studio and Silverlight went nowhere, Apple's Apperture and Final Cut are taking a beating in the marketplace from Lightroom and Premiere, Macromedia was acquired, and Quark lost its de facto DTP monopoly unable to compete with an application Adobe wrote from scratch (it's now at around 25% of the market and still diving).
Also, Adobe didn't declare Flash dead, they just discontinued the development of the mobile browser plugin (which no one was actually targeting). Flash on mobile devices is alive and well and running on Air better than ever, on both the iOS[2] and Android[3].
It's worth pointing out that Adobe has only declared mobile Flash dead. They have yet to say anything to that effect for desktop Flash. That's not to say they aren't thinking it of course.
I disagree it is 'pretty peculiar', I think it is 'pretty obvious' why Adobe has done this. After years of growth and dividends and success, they have gone through a decade of sideways motions where they are resorting various and sundry cost cutting moves to keep their stock afloat. They have 'good enough' disease.
That is the disease where computers and their products which run on those computers have become 'good enough' and their customer base isn't rolling over every 12months to pony up an upgrade fee. One of the interesting ways to see this effect is to look for sales of technical books about older versions of a particular software. When they are still selling well it is because those folks are using the 'old' version rather than upgrade.
Given the pricing model Adobe doesn't have a good way to capture that market. They have aggressively been trying to shut down re-sale of older versions on Ebay and elsewhere but the courts have handed them a couple of set backs too because their licenses do actually allow it.
So they have a product, Flash, which they have already said is 'dead' [2] in that its future is maintenance only, and so they perhaps figure, what the heck, lets get some money out of it before it goes.
[1] http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...
[2] http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/10/technology/adobe_flash/index...