I find it both fascinating and a tad depressing that one of the founders of Macromedia dislikes the company so much. Tim Anderson did an interview with Marc over on his blog, and they about Vista (with which Marc seems very impressed). Marc took the chance to contrast WPF and Flex:
Flash and Flex are toys at best,” he says. “Flex is a rip off of Laszlo. Laszlo will be able to output SWF, DHTML and Avalon (Ryan’s note: I assume he means AJAX). Flex will never do that. The handwriting is on the wall for old-school companies like Adobe.
Since I’ve started reading Marc, I’ve grown to like his writing a lot. He’s smart, he’s got experience, and he writes well. In fact, I agree with half of that post. Adobe is an old-school company (more on that in a second) and Flex will never be able to output SWF, DHTML and AJAX.
First, Flex should never try to output SWF, DHTML and AJAX (or Avalon). It should output SWF, allow connections with AJAX (it does), and play nicely with DHTML (Apollo?). AJAX is a 5 year old technology that tons of smart people have breathed new life into. It will not be a robust way to build Rich Internet Applications 2-3 years from now. It simply won’t be able to handle the multimedia and real-time communication that are going to be so key in RIA space down the road.
Now, the second part. Adobe is an old-school company. They’ve been squeezing PDF like a stone trying to get water from it. But Bruce Chizen is pretty smart, and he realized that the stone approach just wasn’t working. Hence, he went out and bought a company Marc is familiar with – Macromedia. Macromedia has always been ahead of everyone else (sometimes to it’s detriment). They continue to innovate and all signs point to that innovation taking root at Adobe. So maybe Adobe isn’t that old school any more.
TweetRelated posts: