First look: Microsoft Silverlight 3 challenges Adobe AIR

Sure I’ll look forward to HTML5 getting ratified and widespread with 95% of take-up with consistency of user experience like Flash does.

But to be honest the trick is authoring tools.

To be honest, no one cares what platform/runtime it takes to produce the wrappers/delivery around apps and content, they only care how they get there. The key is the designer/developer workflow. The rest is implementation details and reach (that 95% stuff again)

One blatant point in the article is wrong: you can’t compare AIR (desktop client) to Silverlight. WPF, yes, but not Silverlight … provided WPF is cross-platform like AIR is…

For Google, the bottom line is online advertising, and we know that the adoption of open standards is beneficial for their business model. Hence Chrome.

The introduction of Chrome may be bad for Microsoft, but its not clear that it is also a threat to Adobe. Adobe makes money by selling professional design software, which has little to do with the proprietary nature of the Flash runtime.

Adobe has little to gain from trying to impose a proprietary technology on the web, especially with the introduction of Silverlight as a direct competitor. Adobe knows this – that’s why they’re actively opening up their technology like with the open source Flex SDK and the free compiler and are aggressively pushing actionscript in the direction of javascript through the ECMA.

Through future versions of the ECMA script, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a single runtime integrated into the browser that can compile both actionscript and javascript (if there is a difference at that point.)

People may scoff at the idea that Adobe would cede proprietary control of the Flash runtime in favor of an open standards based runtime. But lets look at the bottom line – anyone who wants to can develop targeting flash player without spending a dime on software with the Flex SDK and an open source IDE like FlashDevelop. This is not hurting Adobe’s ability to charge design professionals thousands of dollars for Creative Suite. Adobe would only sell more of its cash cow Creative Suite and would have a better chance of beating out Silverlight with open standards for RIA’s. So, Google Chrome: Good News for Adobe.

Luis, I think that’s already in play with HTML5. As I pointed out in Runtime wars (2): Apple’s answer to Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX, Apple and WHATWG are firmly progressing along those lines. Canvas is at the center of it. The glue language for all this, JavaScript, is getting a potent shot in the arm. The graphics layer, at the level of SVG, needs more work. And so on.

But we still need much better design/development tools to put all the pieces together, as you suggest above. Is that Adobe’s calling? Perhaps. But it’s really hard making money from open-source development tools. Where’s Apple when you need’em? :-)

IMO, the Apple+Mozilla+Google browser-gang (wonderfull term!) is going the “open standards” track with “implementation differences”: the 3 are using HTML/CSS/JavaScript and H.264/ACC/SVG… etc., etc..

Adobe could “lead the market” modifing their applications to make easy developing with those standards… (in part, they already did)… but they would be losing almost all the investment in Flash!

Someone (Apple, Mozilla, Google, any company) should make a Flash/Silvertlight-replacement with SVG/JavaScript (or Ruby or anything).

That’s, at least IMO, the way to go.