Over the past couple years Apple has not hidden its dislike for Adobe's Flash® Platform. They cite it has many problems which include causing applications to crash, using all the memory on a computer, along with many more that are valid complaints. Flash is one of the technologies that is being used to make Rich Internet Applications (RIA's). Since RIA's seem to be where the future of the web is heading today, it is not a good thing that they are not made in a stable environment. In the RIA industry, Adobe provides Flash to build these applications, Microsoft provides Silverlight, and Sun provides Java.
Since the release of the iPhone, Apple has not supported Flash on any of their mobile devices. People might ask, "Did they do it on purpose?" The answer is, "of course they did." Apple has been working on a project of their own for a while, in hopes that it will take the place of Flash later down the road.
Apple's "new" technology is named Gianduia. Apple introduced this technology as "a standards-based client-side framework that can be used for Rich Internet Apps." To many people's surprise, this technology is not new. Apple has been using it in many of their stores and on their website. Some examples include their One-on-One program, Concierge Desk, and Genius Bar.
One of the good things about this "new" technology is that it is going to be open source. This means that anyone willing to invest some time into learning Gianduia can make the technology better for the entire community. This feature is what Flash and Silverlight are missing to truly make them a viable option for the future.
We can only wait to see what is going to happen with this. Who knows? Maybe Flash will prevail and be here to stay. The future holds the answers; we just have to wait to find out.
I personally think that Apple can't and won't be able to keep this up. Adobe is giving them pressure to come up with products that support Flash. You simply can't drop a technology overnight that so many sites currently use!