Project Sparkle
One topic that is hitting the news lately is that of Microsoft's project Sparkle. No one knows for sure what the project is but its been described as some as a "Flash Killer", however:
Comparing Sparkle and Flash is "kind of an apples and oranges comparison," says one Windows developer familiar with Sparkle, who requested anonymity. "On the surface, it looks like Flash, but it's really a programmable 'thing' for doing stuff with Avalon. It's really designed more to make your existing applications do really cool stuff. - [Microsoft Watch]
Is its market so different to that of Macromedia's.
Macromedia has been actively re-positioning Flash (now called Flash MX) as an alternative for building the user interfaces for enterprise applications -- smack into Microsoft’s home turf. -[Avalon a new UI for Windows].
Indeed that is what they have in mind for the Central. Macromedia's John Dowdell has several posts on the topic, it will be interesting to see how this shapes up.
Update.
Interesting comment from the DotNET-fr website (I don't speak French so I had Babel Fish translate it for me).
Personally, I see badly how it could be a question of a Killer Flash, since this project "Sparkle" will certainly not be multi-platforms, contrary to Macromedia Flash.
This is a very valid comment, the Slash Dot comments also stated this. To be fair, Flash is not yet true multi-platforms rather it supports only the biggest desktop contenders so far (Mac and Windows) however Sparkles aim is not to be multi platform, rather its aim (as much as can be gathered) is allow the creation of interface elements for XAML. XAML is tied to Longhorn so unless the API makes it onto other plaforms then Sparkle will remain a tool for Longhorn. In the multi-platform world, Flash remains safe, it's not so clear cut for Longhorn though.
John also thinks that Sparkle could be used in an antitrust case, I guess with the API tied to Longhorn this much could be argued however details for XAML are available for public use and I have not seen any thing that states that XAML could not be ported to other platforms, has anyone seen/heard different? Maybe XAML should go to the ECMA?