This sounds like a decision made by a manager who’s teenage son mentioned the term ‘Open Source’ during the dinner time conversation.

That being said, although Microsofts empire is quite strong so to speak, never discount the power of what Adobe can provide to the folks on the street.

Take some of the Web 2.0 concepts today, it proves that it only takes one good idea and others will follow. So, both camps need to push each other further to get more innovation on the technology table and let us dev’s decide the outcome on the day.

-
Scott / Microsoft.

http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/04/05/jd-confused.aspx

As far as the tech is concerned, WPF is an amazing application development platform. Having had the chance to work with it a bit, it really is light years beyond anything else that is available. Although Flash will retain a small edge on MS in the graphical wow department, WPF/E blows the doors of Adobe’s approach with support for things like a real programming language (C#) and the same development paradigm and tools that the vast majority of developers are going to be using. The number of copies of Visual Studio sold each year easily dwarf any numbers Adobe is going to be pulling out any time soon in relation to Flash and Flex.

Understanding Flash Smack: Ever since Ryan Stewart pointed to the notes by Ben Galbraith of a presentation by two Microsoft staffers, I’ve been trying to understand the quotes “flash is evil”, “we are going to win” and so on. This report by David …

- The folks in question are passionate about what they are working on and I know, it sends some mixed signals to the folks whom are happy with Flash that Microsoft are about to open a can of whoopass on Adobe (which isn’t the case at all).

- In all fairness, going from blank file status to where WPF/e is today (and where it will be soon), I’ll give credit and simply say that they are doing a great job and looking forward to seeing the baked result.

- WPF/e will work on OSX and Windows Platforms in all browsers (Just like Flash).

- WPF/e will have weaknesses and strengths just like FLash will have both and it will come down to the developers in all camps whom decide whats worthy and what’s not. Microsoft and Adobe can each market to their hearts content but ultimately it will be the devs & designers whom decide (good thing).

- JD i know you think Microsoft is simply going to bully their way into the industry which is your opinion but a little ‘dramatic’ if you ask me ;P

- Adobe aren’t looking to play nice with Microsoft, so it’s a little on both sides (ie notice why Flex Data Services doesn’t support .NET and Coldfusion does? could there be a push to drive CF adoption vs ASP.NET maybe?)

- Sorry to say this out loud and clear folks, but Adobe vs Microsoft thing is going to happen a lot as whilst Microsoft are entering the runtime space, the actual intent of WPF/e initially is to provide the .NET developer community a wider reach in X-Platform and Multimedia.

Maybe if Adobe supported .NET more then we’d have a different discussion and folks like The Midnight Coder’s (WebORB) would have a different business model.

-
Scott Barnes
Evangelist
Microsoft – I’m just a guy who gets paid to look at the bigger picture and blog it

Here’s a clear explanation of the “knife the baby” reference:
http://www.businessweek.com/microsoft/updates/up81105b.htm

jd/adobe

Is there a killer App for RIAs? That is doubtful, RIA’s have been around since the IE 4 time (in the most general definition of them_. I do think that RIAs have to be as useful as regular apps that are not internet enabled and feature rich.

In that context we still have a long way to go (for instance the internet word processor that has been mentioned as being revolutionary). People are used to bloatware and very rich feature sets. I think it’s finally time that regular apps start becoming extended with more internet functionality.

That is the one thing that was stiffled development wise due to the issues with Microsoft “anti-trust” suite. Microsoft was forced to put this kinda stuff on hold till someone else did it and created new technologies or approaches.

I think when we talk about Flex and Apollo we rarely talk about anything but cool presentation capabilities. We don’t talk about under-the-hood function because just the basics are there right now.

Finally the dialog is going on as to what should be “under-the-hood” at both Microsoft and Adobe. It’s too bad they both are thinking “proprietary” and not open standards for all of this. Just think if we had one open standard that everyone could write to that worked “under-the-hood”. I don’t mean open source necessarily either. If we can use XML everywhere, why can’t we have an agreed upon set of standards under the hood here that everyone could interoperate to even if there are closed-source platform implementations.

After all we are talking about an INTERNET standard, not a platform specific standard, even at this level.

I believe Adobe RIA, Java, and .Net (and mono) should have some sort of iteroparational layer that they can at least talk to each other pass message and can work together. I would like to use the best of “ALL WORLDS”..

This is just a thought but to me we all have a long way to go..