Rapid Revolution

MS vs Apple: Paul Thurrott writes of the upcoming Vista marketing push: "I want you to mull over that 400 million figure for a bit. 400 million PCs. Running Windows Vista. Within 24 months. That's the business Microsoft 'competes' in. It's a completely different world from the 10 million or so people that use OS X. And that, as they say, is that." Microsoft anticipates an audience of 400 million people in 2 years, and Thurrott is impressed. Now, if only we had timely press releases on Player stats, I could cite you source material showing twice that audience (actual audience, not anticipated audience) in a quarter of the time for Flash Player 8, but as we don't, I can't. :( Still, when you're looking for predictable capabilities on Other Peoples Machines, it's pretty clear what types of platforms offer developers the most rapid evolution....

It seems that the people at Adobe/Macromedia just can't get it through their heads that the Flash player doesn't compete with the Windows OS as a platform, it competes with ASP.NET. If they want to get it up to par for desktop application development, they have a very long way to go, but they could start by making it so that you can launch a SWF file in standalone mode from explorer after you install the darn plugin on your machine.

As far as rapid evolution is concerned, you gotta be kidding me if you are going to try to say that the Flash Player is evolving more rapidly than Windows. Admittedly, the Flash player is an extremely cool technology for certain kinds of web based apps. However, since the Flash Player "Platform" was released, how much have we really gotten? Some video support, a slightly better version of Javascript, and masking effects. WOW! Rapid evolution at its finest. With Vista, those kinds of things are just the tip of the iceburg. We will also get full 3d support, a full webservice (WS-* enabled) stack, speech recognition support, natural language processing support, handwriting recognition, and a load of other new APIs and features. It is pretty safe to say that even if Vista takes 10 years to reach a decent adoption, Flash still won't have anywhere close to 50% of the functionality that the Vista platform gives us.

If we are going to say that the Flash Player provides us "rapid evolution," then I guess we are going to have to say that the Windows Platform provides us "rapid revolution."

[1] http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2006/03/ms_vs_apple.cfm

2 Comments

  • For me and i think for most people, it's not about who's got the biggest euh.. API. It's about if you can get a job. Maybe I look in the wrong places, but I've never run into an job opening for an application developer where Flash experience was a requirement.

  • I think Vista and Flash are in different businesses, myself, but have to deal with many stories where people think they're the same thing.



    If the one (projected) adoption number is big, though, then the second (actual) adoption number is still bigger. Getting predictable capabilities on Other Peoples Machines is a key difficulty for all clientside technologies.



    Flash gets updated with new functionality faster than Windows does, and gets adopted faster too. (Think back to where Flash was when Longhorn started.) Operating system changes do reach deeper into each consenting computer, agreed.



    (btw, the SDK8 is still going through publishing process... frustrating, I know, but there's been a bunch of other stuff that got in ahead of the queue... now that this week's updates are out I'm hoping the SDK goes live soon.... :(

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