The Fortune Blog on AIR and “Creative Destruction”
I just caught a blog over at Fortune.com that talks about Pownce and Adobe AIR and what this means for the software industry. My favorite quote is this one
The arrival of AIR, and a whole family of other new technologies, means, of course, that all the things we’ve gotten used to such as Microsoft Office (MSFT) or even, say, Yahoo Mail! (YHOO), will soon be usurped by newer, better versions.
The article also references Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative distruction. As an economist by education, I couldn’t resist commenting because I think that’s exactly what is going to happen with Rich Internet Applications as a whole. Adobe AIR is uniquely positioned to bridge a gap between web developers and the desktop, so it may speed the process along, but everything we’re seeing, from better interfaces built on top of web services to branded applications, will change how people think of software. It won’t be tomorrow, but developers are evolving and good design is becoming a huge part of the process. In the end, I think we’ll have much more usable, nimble and cross-platform.
[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Adobe AIR, Pownce[tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
July 17th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
I think that there is a revolution forming that will eventually empower users to bridge the gap between what their software does and what they need it to do. I think that technologies like AIR offer a rich toolset for bridging those gaps. But remember in the same way that VB5 offered a new level of application development to the average user, the reality of application designs inherent complexity was never overcome simply by having a better tool. While it may have become easier to make a listbox control, it didn’t become less likely that someone would do something silly with it.
Where I see the ‘front’ of this revolution is in the current professional developer workflow. For years there have been designers that can do some front end code, and a few more middleware guys that knew enough about both ends to piece a prototype together, but the likelihood of there being an end to end guy was pretty low. this was due, I think, to the nature of the design work itself, not the tool. People that think in queries and data grids aren’t the ones to understand visual hierarchy (for example). This leads to compromises built on the strengths and weaknesses of the developer. But with the creation of some of these frameworks, IDE’s and other toolsets, some of that knowledge has been ‘built in’. These n-generation tools provide standardized interfaces that are more familiar to each of the various roles, and allow them to stick with what they do best. Still, without understanding the actual mechanics of an async database call, they can create a very cool application that addresses their needs.