October 5, 2007 4:00 AM PDT
Perspective: Is Adobe breathing down Microsoft's neck?
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That fired imaginations. Instead of writing applications chained to a proprietary operating system, developers would build programs that ran on top of the Internet browser.
Microsoft was dead in the water. Or so a lot of smart people wanted to believe.
Even Netscape's co-founder, Marc Andreessen, got caught up in the hype, famously dismissing Windows as a "poorly debugged set of device drivers." A lot of people felt the same way. If the industry was about to embrace Web-centric computing, Microsoft would be in danger of losing its hegemony over desktop computing.
Of course, if I had a nickel for every time some smarty-pants claimed to have found a surefire Microsoft killer, I wouldn't have to meet deadlines for a living. The optimistic scenario obviously didn't work out the way Andreessen and his fellow travelers hoped it would. But the final coda had yet to be engraved on this story.
Now comes the announcement of a new product from Adobe Systems that intrigues me--as much for what it suggests about Adobe's ambitions as for what it might presage about the future.
I'm simplifying, but Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR, lets you build applications that are kind of the best of both worlds. That is, they'll run in a Web browser or as a standard client app on your desktop (and, presumably, OS-agnostic, too).
There's a lot of activity in this field--including the rise of browser-based Office competitors. This cross-platform development approach has been attempted before. Sun is still trying with Java on desktop. The company announced Java FX at JavaOne this year.
Of course, there are some potential limitations. People can do a lot with scripting languages. (That's where Ajax comes in. You can write an AIR application with an Ajax toolkit.) Adobe's doing Photoshop Express with scripting, but some apps still will require the native OS. But to the degree that any of this is successful, it means the further marginalization of Windows (someday, maybe).
We can quibble over who's got the better technology, but there's a bigger picture to consider. With all the recent advances in Web development the last couple of years, this is emerging as a golden era for users. We're up for grabs and now we've got options--lots of them.
When former Sun CEO Scott McNealy and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison were barnstorming around the country during the bubble trying to sell the world on the network computer, it was--as McNealy was wont to say on other occasions--all hat and no cattle. (Sorry Scott, but I couldn't resist.) The big reason the network computer approach failed to work was the "cloud" factor. Critics like Microsoft would (rightly) note that it was impossible to work on your spreadsheet or word processing documents unless you were first connected to the Internet. If you needed 24-7 access to your stuff, you had to pay The Man.
But a product like AIR, which is still in beta, allows people to do their work offline. They can drag and drop graphics or text between Web and desktop applications without first needing to be online. One potential negative: AIR is another proprietary plug-in and people may not want to write to it because it's Adobe's technology and consumers may get sick of downloading yet one more download.
In public, Adobe's observing diplomatic protocol. Instead of waving a red flag in front of Microsoft, Adobe execs dismiss any suggestion that they're spoiling for a fight with Microsoft (or the Java development community, for that matter.) Speaking earlier in the week with my CNET News.com colleague Martin LaMonica, Adobe's chief software architect Kevin Lynch offered this gem of an understatement: "Microsoft is trying to bring the .Net community to the Web. We are really focused on bringing the larger Web community to the desktop. It's two different approaches. It's not a head-on thing--it's just two groups of developers," Lynch said. "Our bet is on the Web."
I'm not sure that's going to mollify the folks in Redmond. But Microsoft is getting used to living--and competing for your loyalty--in a brave new world.
Biography
Charles Cooper is CNET News.com's executive editor of commentary.
See more CNET content tagged:
Marc Andreessen, Adobe Systems Inc., Scott McNealy, AJAX, network computer
1) I think the marginalization of the OS is inevitable, becuase of a combination of many things.
2) Do end-users make (development) platforms successful, or are do they become sucessful because *developers* build apps that end-users want?
3) Does anyone actually think that HTML + JavaScript is actually a GOOD way to build software? Or to they use its becuase that's the tool at hand. Put another way, why would I choose to build a desktop app in HTML, when I could use a far simpler and more powerful toolset?
4) If there was a universal approach to building apps, that really was the best of everything, developers would use it.
5) This comment [i]Microsoft is trying to bring the .Net community to the Web[/i], I dont understand. Its estimated that 80% of .Net development is ASP.NET. The .Net community ALWAYS WAS on the web.
6) What really needs to happen, is a far better model for web based applications. So we have Flash, and we have Silverlight. It will be interesting to see which capture developer mindset. The .Net development community is huge compared the Flash, but Silverlight mainly is a version of WPF which (although excellent) is rather new (< 1 year), and I suspect many ASP.NET developers have never looked at it.
7) In respect to cross-platform support, anyone building in .Net knows that *at the moment*, 90% of desktops and large chuck of servers can run that code. I think this must surely change, and if Microsoft want to keep .Net relevant, it will need to expand its reach. Maybe they know this; silverlight has better cross-platform support, which is a start.
The release of Silverlight and WPF arrival was so bold that it directly threatens Adobe's position. First, Silverlight is aimed to compete with Flash (although I believe it?s way better), WPF is a vector-based graphical subsystem which, in the long run, threatens any raster-based images (Ehem: Photoshop is used primarily for creating raster images ? JPEG, GIF, PNG).
Granted, Flash is ubiquitous but mainly because it has around for a while. It?s riddled with a lot of bugs, poor in performance and poor development tools.
The first, was that I hope the kids in college today are ready for a large shift in technology during their careers. I started out learning Fortran and Assembly Language, then PL/1, then Pascal, then C, then Forth and Ada, then VB, then C++, then Java, then .NET, and now Ruby.... ad nasium. I have crossed so many platforms, languages, and concepts that I truly believe in Future Shock.
The other thing was that there may be the analogy to people moving their money from under their mattress to a bank with the move from desktop to Internet based data collection. Because that is the real issue, IMHO. Wether the app runs on the desktop or from a browser (or ilk) the basic user probably won't care if the connection is always there. Where the data is stored and how safe it is, and how easy it can be accessed will probably drive the whole design concept of the future. Personally, I am still old school enough to want the money stashed under my mattress where I can control it better. (data kept on my personal PC rather than out on the public network)
Now give me complete access to my data on any device I may happen to want to use at any moment(PC, iMAC, iPhone, cell phone, PSP, etc...) and then maybe I will feel more comfortable putting my data at more risk of exposure to the bad guys that live on the web. At least on my personal PC I can still unplug it from the world and keep backups in my saftey deposit box (under my mattress)
Another important thing to mention: Microsoft Internet Explorer is almost as popular as its Windows OS with User base somehow estimated in the range of 80?90% (exact numbers are pretty hard to find). Having this, Microsoft positions itself pretty strong in ?both worlds?: OS and Internet.
There is another consideration to take into account: as modern computing is predominantly Data-Centric, then the biggest players in the software universe would be Databases. Databases can do the lion share of job on their own with just little help from OS (serving peripherals) and Web Browsers (mostly GUI). And in this area Microsoft has the strong word to say: Microsoft SQL Server is one of the most popular Databases existing now.
The only area where competition is really tough is Rich Interactive Media, or to put it simple: online Audio/Video/Animation. As of now this area is dominated by Flash?-based applications, but situation could change dramatically with the proliferation of Microsoft Silverlight? and AJAX extension to ASP.NET.
The only real question in the desktop verses web apps is how thin the client will be. And even if it is a very thin Web Browser, it still will be considered an OS (even if it is on a chip). And then the server OS will be bigger and more powerful to take up the slack.
The discussion in this article is which manufacturer will have the lions share of the market. And what OS will be the product of choice. Will it be Microsoft, Apple, Google, Adobe, or some other... Very valid points, if you take the workload from the desktop and push it onto a server, because the customer only sees the UI. That pushes the server choices on the support staff, and the developers that make the product.
2. Microsoft has excellent Server OS, plus high-performance Web Server (IIS) as well
3. Data storage. First and foremost: data belongs to Databases, which are far more superior performance-wise in dealing with big datasets than any other competing technologies, including XML. Shared Data must be stored in a centralized Database on a server side (w/possible data replication), while for the local data it?s generally better to reside on the client side, though it's sometime justified to store it on server side either. This is a classic Performance vs. Accessibility dilemma.
4. Modern programmatic paradigm regarding Web Client is expressed in RIA concept. To put it in simple words: User event handling, i.e., navigation and other highly-interactive man-machine communication tasks should be handled by client script (mostly by AJAX-enabled technologies), while serious number-crunching and heavy dataset-based operation should be performed on server side.
Regards,
Dr. Alexander Bell
Java entered in when the web world was relatively young and immature. It gave a shot of adrenelin to everybody looking for the newest cool thing in computers. And we were getting in on the ground floor and being able to reinvent things with very simple code. Even if it was terribly slow the first year or so, it allowed mixed shops to do cross-platform stuff. It was truely groundbreaking.
I doubt if the Adobe entrance into the arena will be as lauded. Things are much more sophisticated now, and you just can't take a weekend and create something nobody has seen before. Elbowing into the competition will be much harder now than it was for Java.
Even in cell phone programming Java is slowly losing admirers. Just read the hype on Ruby...
So if developers will find .Net to be way easier than AIR - why would they go with Adobe. I am developer myself - and just can not see a reason to abandon .Net and go AIR way...
IMHO Adobe has made the brilliant decisions of all software companies. They aquired Macromedia. Adobe now owns PDF and everything Flash and the transistion has even produced better products IMHO. I use Adobe products everyday (since Adobe came to life) and no other software has ever came close to match the consitence of quality and elegance that is the Adobe Experience. Adobe software not only works it works great.
Adobe is going to succeed in this new effort without any doubt no other company has the needed, developed and mature products Adobe is using in thier new masterpiece.
IMHO in this particular and specific instance I think Adobe is head and shoulds above the Goliath Microsoft. The bigest difference between Adobe and Microsoft is Adobe smokes Microsoft in the quality department. As far as quality of product these two companies are at opposite ends of the software spectrum.
Adobe wins checkmate (time will tell)
It might also be true that Microsoft has shipped some fairly half-baked products, but it has a very strong traditon of suppling and supporting developers. At the moment, the .NET team is completely in the zone, so to speak, in a way that most of Microsoft just isn't (IIS and Windows Server teams are also up there).
The reason why the .Net developers here are saying what they are saying, is that they know that applications are a lot more than a pretty UI. You need excellent support for things like Xml, web services, data access, transactioning, scaleability, security etc, from the client to the middle-tier(s) to the data store.
.Net provides all this in one proven, consistent platform.
Whilst I dont think its a forgone conclusion where this goes, its easy to imagine the juggernaut that wehn the .Net development community starts building apps in Silverlight (which I suspect wont be until big time until Silverlight 1.1 and VS2008 are out), Adobe will be be changing tack.
Dr. Alexander Bell, NY
Silverlight is a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation, so in a sense, 'Silverlight for the Desktop'.
Of course, WPF is a the presentation layer, and the rest of .Net is behind it.
It's like all the people who talk about Adobe/Macromedia Flash as the next big thing again in web development. Adobe refuses to support a wide array of operating systems including all the BSDs and AMD64bit versions of Linux. Heck they even skipped a version of Flash for Linux only a few years ago. If an API is open and standardised we don't have these problems.
I'd like to add that obviously noyt all commercial companies are evil and will create closed systems but to me this latest Adobe effort, Microsft's "me too" SilverLight and other things all have the same underlying problem.
Open standards must be used, not some proprietary system. It's the reason why the World Wide Web was successful over CompuServe and so forth.
This may be a "bonafide Microsoft killer", but it's not an answer to the fundamental underlying problem.
- what's really real...
- by bbauer0406 October 9, 2007 8:36 AM PDT
- Expecting that anyone will create a silver-bullet werewolve/vampire/Microsoft killer is silly. Non-computer geeks drive the Internet and computing; i.e., users.
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(27 Comments)Generally speaking, these folks have no interest in loading up Linux, troubleshooting driver issues, sniffing out security and malware problems. They just want their computer to work; which, arguably, Microsoft and the computer companies have done.
The thing is simply this. Your computer is like a car and its internal combustion engine. Microsoft is like gasoline; the fuel to make it work. Now, you may argue that gasoline/Microsoft contribute to global-warming and a poor computing environment. But until a "greener" fuel/operating system comes along, we're stuck with the Middle East situation and Seattle.