The race to take over the world is on. It is not about who has better application anymore. It is not office live vs picasa anymore. It is not even about the suites. Live vs all of google, no it is just appearances. It has long since become clear that applications are the compoments in the grander scale game.
So it is who has better platform. Who is going to redefine the web as we know it.
Google has accumulated enough good web2 applications and more then enough gifted web develoeprs. They are borded. DHTML does not challenge them anymore. So they want a piece of desktop action, and they want you to be offline but still work on your browser. That is why they cram a tiny web server and a tiny open source database into something that lives iniside your browser and allows you to work in your web application Internet or not Internet.
Microsoft thougth along the same line. They realized they need a markup UI. It is about good looks and flexibility. So they have XAML in Vista. Now they about to cram .NET into a plugin, add the very same XAML they already know how to render and all of a sudden you have a mini – Vista inside your browser.
Adobe bought Macromedia for Flash. They always were a good graphics software company. And somehow they developed the world domination ambition. I guesss it was PDF that did it. They think Flash, installed on 100% computers gives them a decent shot. Now Appolo renamed AIR is out. AIR is DHTML that runs locally on your machine instead of the browser.
Who’ll win? My crystal ball is crystal clear about it. The one who gets the developers.
Google have great web applications and they work hard to give out the API (called Google Data or GData) for developers to mesh. The problem is that the front end is still DHTML, the environment in which developers have to struggle to do something that works well.
Flash is dominant, so Adobe have some head start. And Flash has all the artistics types strongly behind them. The problem is those types do not count. And the problem is developer tools for Flash suck. Adobe tries to open source Flex3, we’ll see how it goes. So far Flex was only marginally better for a pure code writer then DHTML. So people do not switch to it for the ease of use. They do because of vector graphics. Google based most beautiful Analytics reporting features on Flash.
Microsoft shall win this one. Silverlight is in the infancy. But it is conceptually the right thing. Microsoft has clout to stuff it to everybody’s throat so 2 years from now it will be 100% on platforms that matter. .NET is a stable platform. Microsoft used its time well. .NET class library and runtime engine came a long way. But the real winner is visual studio. It is so much better then anything else out there except IntelliJ IDEA, and paired with Resharper it is invicible.
I didn’t see Orcas yet, but it by the release time it will be 3 years since VS2005 and MS know how to do good tools. Vista will make everyone port to it, meaning developers will get to know VS2008 (orcas). Army of component vendors will be happy to sell you another version of calendar control. Book authors will relabel what they have already written about vista xaml to scream “silverlight” and push it out. The ecosystem will allow microsoft to do in 2 years what took Flash to reach in 10. By the time Ubuntu will own 30% of desktop, and they will because of the price cut Dell will pass along to consumer, it will not matter anymore. Microsoft will control the browser plugin that will be more important then browser.
Who’s a looser? Adobe yes. It will vanish. PDF is not enough to save it. Photoshop is not enough. Flash will go the way of $1000 per font cash cow. Google will survive. They have a good suite and will probably be what Mac is today. An platform for the best of us.
I think one unexpecte looser is Apache and linux servers. Once Microsoft owns the client platform (silverlight) and it will, mind you, be cross-platform and run on linux desctops and on macs, they’ll do the only logical thing – they’ll make Silverlight only talk to their servers. So companies will have to pay up for NT servers (Vista or whatever the incarnation) and IIS.
I don’t know how they’ll do it. Silverlight can talk XML or Json. So it will require a clever play and I think it will not be one bold move. it will creap in. But watching how ASP.NET has been advancing, I am positive those guys still have what it takes to pull it off.
