As I always preface these things, the web is great and it’s enabled new lines of communication and opened up a monumental amount of information for everyone in the world. As it has evolved, we’ve gotten more ways to plug in. Our cell phones have access to it, PDAs use it, laptops and PCs connect to it and even MP3 players stream music from it. As a result, there has been a movement to make things more streamlined and much simpler so that the content can be accessed by anyone anywhere. For the most part, this is great. Web Services and Micrformats go along way towards making information consistent and consumable.

But other times this simplicity can be taken to an extreme. As good as web applications have become, they’re still accessed by a browser and they have to be simple enough to render correctly within those rules.

But why not break the web out of the browser and take advantage of the power of PCs? There are a few reasons. Programming for the desktop is hard, operating system marketshare is fragmented and installing software on the PC has become intrusive by the standards of the web. Apollo solves all of these problems.

The desktop wasn’t ever in danger of going away, but if you listen to the hype, web applications were taking over the world and desktops were nothing more than $2,000 – $3,000 dumb terminals. But Apollo (and Windows Presentation Foundation for Windows) is breathing new interest into the world of desktop development. You can use web technologies, use the same code for deploy your application on Mac and Windows, and take advantage of the benefits of the desktop like offline access and local file storage.

The web has revolutionized everything, and it’s going to do the same for desktop development. With how easy Apollo makes it to build a desktop application, we are going to see a great blend of web and desktop. With the expanded importance of multimedia on the web, a good next step is to create an immersive experience on the desktop that takes advantage of the web. That’s the kind of thing Apollo enables.

[tags]Adobe, Apollo, Flash, Flex, Web 2.0, Web Applications[/tags]