It's important to note that the product was not important. It could have been Flash or HTML5 or Fooware. What the founders saw was an intersection between demand and capability, and built a business to exploit that availability gap.

I'd argue with this assertion. I think what you meant to say was that the technology choice wasn't important. The product was obviously important, since without the product there is no company, nothing for anyone to acquire etc.

But I agree in an extremely hypothetical way that the technology choice is unimportant, assuming you can make the same competitive product with a number of technologies. In this case though, especially back in 2005, you simply can't argue that they could have made that product with anything else (apart from desktop software, which is a totally different product space). They were clearly aware of their technology choices, were keeping tracking of the latest and greatest, and chose the only one that was technically feasible for the product they wanted to create.

I don't think illumin8 is trying to argue that it could have been done with anything else at that exact point in time, just that they identified an opportunity and the technology that could make that happen. That the technology was flash, is in this instance mere coincidence.

That said, I agree that flash has been an enabler for many advances on the web. Unfortunately, the flash plugins just seem to be bogged down more and more, and don't seem to evolve very effectively.

Sorry, product was a poor choice of words. I meant technology choice, as you pointed out.