Flash in the pan?

I've never been a big fan of Flash. I'm not impressed by shiny things and all too often Flash has been used for purely aesthetic reasons. It's also rubbish for SEO and a pain to update.

Thankfully you virtually never see websites entirely built in Flash these days, it's also been banished from site navigation. The main, and best, use of Flash is as a way of showing video without requiring an imbedded player to be present.

Up and coming web standards promise to let us achive some of what we would have previously turned to Flash for. Mobile devices demand plain, fast to download content. Best of all the iPhone, iTouch and iPad don't support flash content.

So is Flash a technological dead end? Ultimately if Apple doesn't adopt it soon sites that need to perform (as opposed to just look good) will be stripping it out. For myself if HTML5 improvements can help me achieve the same effect then I know which I'd rather use.

My predication is that Flash will continue to slowly fade away save for embedded videos and misguided and obtrusive advertising.

(Then again I was once convinced that Javascript was dead since it was so badly supported and could often be replaced with rock solid server side scripting. Improved browser compatibility and AJAX has made Javascript an essential web technology.)