I base the claim that they were focused on short-term returns on the way bugs went unfixed and performance was neglected for most of that period until it was too late.<p>They beat Real&#x2F;QT thanks to marketshare from the bundling deal they&#x27;d signed with Microsoft and I really think they thought that would last forever because nobody else would catch up. When the iPhone came out, the public statements made it clear that they didn&#x27;t seriously expect the no-plugin policy to last or that it&#x27;d drive users away – and it certainly never looked like anyone took the ton of problems experienced by Android users seriously enough to take the product out of maintenance mode.<p>It took years of them being derided as the leading source of browser crashes and exploits before they even started to offer automatic updates in 2012! – and naturally they rolled their own so it didn&#x27;t work reliably for years.<p>Similarly, performance was obviously not a priority until it started being heavily mentioned as a reason to prefer the HTML5 stack, at which point they were hopelessly behind and unwilling to invest enough to catch up.<p>I mentioned my poor support experience because that also fits with the general pattern. The bugs I reported were mostly in the runtime, although the IDE definitely had problems (stability, unreliable debugger, etc.), and all of this was well-known in the community along with the belief that the only way to get attention was if you worked somewhere large enough to buy millions of dollars worth of licenses.<p>All of that is consistent with my theory that the product management was focused on the short-term and loathe to spend money on anything which wasn&#x27;t critical, which left them in the unenviable cycle of reacting late to threats from a year or two ago rather than leading anything. If they&#x27;d invested in quality during the early 2000s the last decade might have gone very differently.