This white paper, What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It? is a great read if you're in the business of developing "casual games" or online games and you've pondered the value of Flash in your life. I've been really strongly researching alternatives to using Flash and Director/Shockwave for online games, but this is a good article showing many details about what Flash offers and where it fails.

I've been working with Flash for a long time now, but only within the last couple years have I really dug into it to see some of the power behind it. I worked with Macromedia Director (yeah, I know it's Adobe now) for a long time and moved to Flash because of clients. I like them both for different things, and I despise each of them for some stuff. This article at least analyzes the product from a non-marketing angle. It's a presentation the author gave at a Game Developers Conference one year and I think it's still pretty complete.

For bigger projects and shareware projects, I'm still considering other tools... but I'll discuss that later. :)