While it is good to see Adobe listening to customers, but I can't help the niggling feeling this is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The horse bolted, joined a herd, sired offspring, those offspring grew up, the world stopped riding horses, cars became commonplace, roads and railways went up. Then Adobe saw the stable door was ajar.
Adobe changed course to "HTML5 is the future" several years ago - late or not, the stable door's been closed for quite a while.
With that said, the fact that Flash-The-Animation-Tool is getting renamed is fairly big for animators who use it. Adobe hasn't done much with the tool over the past few years and many (well, me anyway) wouldn't have been all that shocked to see it EOL'ed or left to languish in maintenance mode. The fact that they're rebranding it suggests to me that the execs decided they still wanted a vector/timeline animation tool even in a post-SWF world, and to invest in that direction. In a sense changing the name is just shedding baggage, but they wouldn't have done it just to let the tool die under different branding.
(former Adobe employee, all content pure speculation)
I get the "negative image" of Flash thing. But it's a dumb decision from a marketing stand point. Customers want stable tools , not EOL'ed tools like Flash IDE (soon) or Adobe Edge Animate which has just been discontinued. The trust is broken and selling is about trust.
It means that Adobe doesn't really believe in all these products. I took part in a new Director Beta 2/3 years ago but the product was never released.
Adobe just don't know what the hell they are doing, people should be really careful about using any web authoring tool from them.
At the same time it creates a good market opportunity for small vendors, I hope some cease this opportunity.
