Cringely claims that Adobe is making a move for the embedded and mobile device market.

Good GUIs are expensive and take time to perfect. Cringely says that it would save money for the companies involved if they could write their GUIs from just one platform and use Flash’s superior tools. It would also be nice if this would improve GUIs by making them cheaper, thereby saving us from bad design.

He has a point: each device may have a different ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) and/or OS. The ipods for instance use an ARM CPU by PortalPlayer running some custom OS (BTW rockbox rox!),
the iphone uses a different ARM chip running a version of OS X, and my Nokia N73 uses yet another ARM chip running the Symbian OS.
The same goes for other embedded devices such as cash registers, ATMs and other kiosks, and many of your future electronic appliances (most microwave ovens’ digital interfaces suck).

The funny thing is, that Adobe only has to promise cross-platform compatibility, without actually having to port Flash/whatever to every single platform (open source implementations may fill this niche). People just need to feel safe in order to commit, and Flash has a good track record. (Flash is backwards-compatible and compiled “animations” play exactly the same on every platform.)
The software market for mobile devices can’t really take off until they do.