There's a great rundown of what happened on somebody else's blog, so I'll let you read that.

I say, who cares if the "standard" doesn't get officiated? From my experience, the best industry "standards" emerge from powerful libraries and rich language features, which gain popularity through developer love as opposed to a big stamp from a standards body. Examples of "standards" like this that come to mind include Spring, Hibernate, new Ajax libraries for JavaScript, etc.

Personally, I think AS3 is a great language, and really enjoy developing in it. If it's not going to be in IE and Firefox as the next version of JavaScript, then so be it; keep it in the Flash player. Support for a language in IE does not strike me as a reason to change the direction for Flex.

I don't develop heavily in JavaScript, so I don't know if anybody from that community will be missing out based upon this decision, but I doubt it; the JavaScript community has insanely useful and powerful libraries at their fingertips these days. I do think it would be nice if there was a common standard that could be compiled down to (which I believe was the point of Adobe opening Tamarin and its adoption in Firefox). I also think it's a shame that I won't be able to fully transport my skills from AS3 to JS coding, but to be honest, there are so many similarities between AS3 programming and JS as it stands that the language barrier is already pretty non-existent.

Finally, I would love to see Adobe run with this and put all the non-compliant ECMAScript features they had to take out (like private constructors, abstract classes, etc.) back in. As much as I see the strength in standards compliance across environments, they do put some shackles on innovation. Let's see this through as an opportunity to make Flash better.

Looks like I'm not the only one who feels this way.