I attended the official launch party for Adobe AIR (Pacific Region) today and as much as the tech is impressive, I walked away with one strong observation: this is a user base war.
Adobe’s Pacific technical director Mark Blair gave the keynote, and I can sumarize it as such: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere. There was a Q&A after the keynote that added to that, but the only main new addition I got from that is that AIR should be coming to Linux this year.
During Blair’s presentation was a slide on the companies developing AIR apps. Some we’ve covered already, like eBay, then there were other names like the NASDAQ developing with AIR. Locally the Commonwealth Bank was developing an AIR app for Brokers. There was also some impressive demonstrations post show, including a TripIt clone that runs on AIR (post still to come).
There’s no arguing that AIR is highly capable, but so is Microsoft’s Silverlight. Adobe and Microsoft have entered a war of attrition, where like HD DVD vs Blu-ray one will eventually come out on top. Having said that both may well happily co-exist side by side for years to come, but history shows that eventually the market will pick a favorite.
Disclosure: Adobe Australia paid for my trip to the launch
I attended the official launch party for Abode AIR ….
abode?
AIR and Silverlight are seductive pollution for the web …. browser wars of the 90’s all over again… yawn..
As I wrote yesterday, I think AIR is a big deal and it is a big threat to microsoft as it essentially eliminates the need to write to the windows API, which has been a pillar of the microsoft monopoly. But dude, you have made a huge mistake and you put it in the headline. AIR is not competitive with silverlight. AIR is a tool that lets you run Flash/flex and HTML/Javascript apps offline. Silverlight is a flash/Flex competitor. But Silverlight wont let you run stuff offline. I know a lot of people have made this mistake but this *is* techcrunch.
I think there’s a big difference between AIR and Silverlight at the moment. It’s fair to say Microsoft will push Silverlight forwards quickly but there’s no fair comparison between them at the moment, it’s far closer to compare Flash and Silverlight for the time being as AIR features a lot more than Silverlight offers.
Flash and PDF have huge market share and AIR brings those plus regular HTML/CSS/JS web development into one runtime as well making easy cross-platform offline / online application development.
It’s certainly good that there’s some competition in the market but AIR’s incorporation of various open source projects such as Webkit as well as the fact that Adobe have open sourced a lot of their own code such as Flex and Flash Player code will hold a lot of mindshare of developers.
As I said, competition is good, and the fact the MS are developing web development apps to challenge Dreamweaver is a good thing. Dreamweaver is a great program but it needs to keep progressing to provide the tools that developers need.
One other aspect that Dreamweaver (Adobe / Macromedia) has done a good job with is support for multiple server platforms such as their own ColdFusion but also PHP and JSP development. I’m not sure we’ll see any of Microsoft’s ‘Expression’ development apps support PHP and JSP any time soon!
i must agree on that one
i must agree on that one
I’m not so sure about your thoughts on one tech ultimately killing off the other. The HD DVD v Blue Ray isn’t a logical comparison IMO. With HD DVD v Blue Ray, the customer has to make an investment. When there is a monetary cost associated to a technology there is a far greater likelihood of one technology ousting the other simply because consumers aren’t going to want to purchase two products for a similar experience. With AIR v Silverlight (although they are two very different things and don’t compare well in the first place), there is no investment required. Users aren’t required to make an additional purchase, they are required to merely perform an unobtrusive download/install.
Little late for a response but I think in this context the ‘market choice’ belongs to the development houses and consultancies, which definitely do have to make an investment in monetary terms. ie in resourcing and training. From a user/client perspective you’re right there is no real monetary effect but the end-user won’t affect this battle.
The coordination problem happens when both the development houses and the consumer have to make an investment. If the consumer doesn’t have to make an investment, the developer could theoretically choose -either- platform, and have reasonable confidence that whichever choice he made, the consumer can easily deal with. Likewise, if the developer didn’t have to make an investment, the consumer could pick either platform, and assume that a smart developer would produce for both.
Another good alternative to these to that I have happened across is haXe. It was created by the same guy who built MTASC. Its certainly worth checking out as it apparently can do the whole Desktop “thing”.
is there a silverlight plugin for firefox? what about MAC or Linux?
As an ASP.NET Programmer I think:
1. Anyone using .NET to develop web applications will use Silverlight.
2. Regarding PHP programmers – it’s a good question which side will they take, I’m guessing Adobe AIR.
Either way, the web is REALLY going to change when these two technologes become mainstream.
There is a Silverlight plugin for Firefox. The plugin will also work on Safari and on the MAC. Linux support is available through the Moonlight project. This project is headed by a true leader in the Linux community and Microsoft is providing the media codecs: http://weblogs....-announced.aspx. Silverlight 1.0 is really about media and banner ad scenarios. Silverlight 2.0 is about creating rich web-based applications (I’m writing a book about Silverlight 2.0
). This version will have a public release next week at the MIX event (http://blogs.ms...rlight-2-0.aspx)
Ultimately, these technologies (Silverlight / AIR / Flex) are about delivering an experience for users. Because of this, I believe that Silverlight is a better choice. The reason why is because of Performance, Performance, Performance. As an immediate example, I did a search for a cover flow control in Flex and one in Silverlight. The ones I found in Silverlight ran smoothly. The ones I found in Flex were jerky. The reality is, as web applications grow in complexity, performance is going to be an important part of delivering a great user experience.
In addition, Silverlight provides a developer experience that is second-to-none. With Silverlight 2.0, a subset of the powerful .NET Framework will be available for developers to use. In addition, developers can choose to use one-of-two ECMA standardized languages (C# or JavaScript), or they can use Visual Basic.NET, or they can use IronPython or IronRuby. Choice is important.
There are also tools for designers which provide a SEAMLESS collaboration between designers and developers.
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT work for Microsoft.
I think you are right
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Adobe has an advantage because flex applications can be deployed to the browser using the existing Flash plugin which has 95% penetration
As a Software Developer I’m interesting in the deployment numbers and Adobe in my mind has already won this part of the war!
I guess Microsoft’s plan is to Launch Internet Explorer 8 loaded with Silverlight and not Flash, and try to corner the market once again. Honestly, I doubt Silverlight will be Flash since so many people have invested years into mastering Flash. And chances are Flash is still going to be superior product, especially with the Desktop functionality that AIR brings.
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Yea, AIR and Silverlight are different beasts. It is about users and numbers for adoption, but Silverlight isn’t directly competing against AIR. Flash and Flex, yes. AIR no. AND BTW Flex 3 was released yesterday too.
Or has Silverlight now started being a desktop app and removed from the browser, all with native db for offline use and syncing when online?
Nobody actually uses silverlight and when they do, it won’t be on Linux. And IF it is on Linux, it won’t be the same experience. And it will take a MS IDE.
i think you are right silverlight fare away from flex.
@7 – Yes, yes, and yes. Microsoft releases SilverLight for Windows/Mac, IE and FF (even Safari). They also support the Moonlight project, which runs SilverLight on Linux (part of the Mono project). The recent releasing of all API docs and an agreement to allow all open source projects to use MS API’s/protocols/etc without threat of lawsuit greatly helps projects like Mono.
Adobe’s track record with Linux has been awful – only after MS announced they support the Linux version did Adobe announce they would update the aging flash runtime for Linux as well. Competition in action, a good thing.
While user’s may have a preference between Flex/SL (as pointed out, AIR is slightly different – it’s more like a local Java VM), it will more important what platform developers build on. The SL IDE (VS2008) is available for free, Flex/AIR is trial only, then $300. There are a legion of .Net developers who already know how to program .Net and can instantly start writing (even porting) apps to SL.
Adobe has a lead in install base of the client, but a 4mb DL for SL isn’t much of a barrier so they need to move quickly. MS needs to catch up in terms of install base, and also attract the design talent normally attracted to the Adobe products. Adobe needs to consider loosening up it’s tech stack – many “advanced” features of Flex only work with an Adobe server (read $$$$).
I think MS has a leg up right now in that many of these apps will first appear as internal corporate apps, built by custom developers in-house. There, browser penetration doesn’t matter, but deployment/maintenance costs do. For any shop that’s already supporting .net Apps in-house, SL is a no-brainer.
Let us not forget that SilverLight has the 08 Olympics… that should certainly help push platform adoption.
I’m shocked at the inaccuracies of this post and within some of the comments.
Please put some honest, well-educated clarity into an updated post ASAP – this entire thread is misleading and incorrect.
@Michael C. Neel – Flex 3 is OpenSource and a free download including Adobe AIR’s API and documentation. There is NO cost in developing with Flak 3 SDK & AIR. There is a $300 price tag associated with Flex Builder…
@Floyd: Don’t you need to balance the penetration advantage that Flash enjoys against the client-side installation advantage of Silverlight via Windows and IE? Since AIR is all about access to local resources and offline use, seems to me a key battleground will be deployment of the runtime into the protected client space.
@14
you’re certainly right about Adobe having a terrible track record on Linux..
I second Michael C. Neel’s assessment of SL development for internal use.
Microsoft is first choice for corporate developers. Office, Intranet, Reporting, DBs, applications – whatnot.
I believe the adoption will start from there. SL apps will be perceived carrying more value (being corporate apps as opposed to consumer apps). Secondly corporate development has different set of requirements – security, back end connections, hosting environment – all of these favors Silverlight.
Having said that competition is good and hopefully developers will win.
@14… yeah, a “no brainer” ,,, meaning departments that elect to develop an application on SL have “no brains” … hehehe j/k
Why is everyone comparing Silverlight to AIR. Silverlight is actually a Flash competitor NOT an AIR competitor.
Silverlight is for Rich Internet Apps that are accessed online, whereas AIR takes apps offline.
The real rub for ASP.NET guys like myself is we will likely be forced to develop apps that can only be accessed online whereas the rest of the universe develops online/offline apps.
Microsoft has a leg up. Ha Ha.
Air = Web apps offline and on the desktop, with some local access. A hybrid of sorts.
Silverlight = Browser plugin akin to Flash, can do animation, video, etc. Nothing to do with the desktop apps.
In other words, no comparison. You didn’t do your homework here.
“Nothing to do with the desktop apps.”
True but not entierly true…
Silverlight is written using a XAML and .Net languages same as WPF which used to create windows desktop applications. So the skill set cross over directly. Anyone who can write a silverlilght app will have a very small learning curve corssing over to writing windows based desktop apps and vice versa….
As a software architect using mostly Adobe products for the last 8 years, I’m excited about this “rivalry”, not so much about who’s going to pick sides or who’s going to “win”. Either way whether or not you are using Silverlight or AIR both the technical community and specially the end-users will win! And this is good for our industry. So to all of us, I raise a toast to what I fell will be some exciting and prosperous time ahead…
Cheers..
Heather please try and filter TC ads, I’ve got Britney Spears cleavage in the corner of my eye.
I think Silverlight 2 (which is due to be release at Mix08) is going to be ON/Offline too.
check http://weblogs....verlight-2.aspx
Uhmm … So what’s Microsoft’s core competency these days? Silverlight certainly isn’t or won’t be it. They need to choose between leveraging existing product lines or sacrificing them for the goal of future product adoption.
Unless every man woman and child move to using Firefox (or AWAY from IE) MS will win this battle. Look what they did to flash embedded content.
OK, at least the MAJORITY of folks will need to leave IE but that is a huge order and why MS continues to be the player that it is. At least online.
MS will break every threat to its hegemony at each and every opportunity.
Wouldn’t you?
good, continue write and debate about air and silverlight, create lots of buzzzzzz, and when all eyes and ears on them , google and others will take the offline market under there nose. desktop is dead , soon offline concept will no longer be valid, we all be connected to cloud os . microsoft using it’s legacy ideas to innovate, let them be, they are relevant
just like “looming scarcity of mainframe skills” .
Compare AIR to WPF, or Flash to AIR, but it doesn’t make any sense to compare AIR (desktop technology) to Silverlight (web only technology)
Personally I’ve yet to come across a website with Silverlight content. But as others have pointed out, Air is something completely different. I can think of dozens of websites that could benefit from added functionality by releasing an Air version of their site, and all they’d have to do to get started is to package up their existing HTML and javascript and/or Flash/Flex apps.
That’s the beauty of Air – you can take the client side of a web app, turn it into a desktop app and start adding additional functionality, such as taking advantage of local storage, native windows, system tray integration etc.
You only “pay” in terms of development time for the additional offline functionality you add.
Imagine Gmail with no need for the Google notifier, and an offline mode because Gmail itself is running as a local app and can download copies of your mail, for example, yet when you use another computer it’s all still there.
Imagine Google Apps with the ability to use local storage, and ability to function offline.
No need to write an application from scratch – just wrapping the UI in Air and incrementally adding small bits of code to add extra functionality.
Air is the only Adobe product that’s excited me in years.
You people are missing a huge issue in this debate. The designer will play a huge role in how apps get deployed on the web or off with these next gen technologies. FACT: Photoshop/Illustrator/Flash blow Expression’s stuff away. Designers will not switch to Expression. It doesn’t run on a MAC and never will. This gives Adobe a huge leg up here for anything that is going to face the customer. Internal apps are a different story, I could see Silverlight taking a majority of those because of the existing codebase and the fact that they don’t need to look good.
Hi Duncan, can you explain why you look at the release of a new beyond-the-browser initiative, and compare it to future promises of an in-browser plugin which doesn’t add anything new to today’s deployed browsers? That seems to be the missing piece in your post here.
(AIR is a desktop runtime, where anyone can use normal webdev techniques to create cross-OS native applications with local file system access, drag’n'drop, native or neutral windowing systems, much more. AIR is desktop apps. Silverlight promises to be a way for .NET developers to do Flash-like things inside a browser, and they’re ‘way behind on delivery promises. In-browser vs beyond-the-browser, two quite different types of technology.)
As the folks above questioned, what might lead you to link the two concepts? The article’s mystifying as-is.
tx, jd/adobe
One needs to download AIR runtime to run AIR apps. This is a huge obstacle for its adoption.
I think Adobe tried this before and failed miserable – anyone remember Central? And Flash apps are slower then even Java GUI apps, so for now both Silverlight and Flash are interesting tech demos but nothing more. Of course, Adobe and the Flash camp will scream that AIR will rule the web. Like they were screaming that Flash will one day supercede HTML. Unless it’s faster and easier to developer than the current technologies (HTML/JS) it will be ignored by the majority, like tons of similar technologies – Google Gears, JavaFX, etc.
AIR is not comparable to Silverlight. AIR runs on the desktop, not the browser. Silverlight competes with Flex – both run in the browser.
Right now Flex has a big lead because the Flash plugin has 97% browser penetration and a full component model for building web apps + a pretty decent IDE. Silverlight is probably better tech, but years behind in maturity.
Well, I believe the wpf side of vista and I believe can be run in xp is very closely related to silverlight. Silverlight also lets you use visual C#, ruby, python, whatever you want as long as it compiles into your dll. Being able to use the most useful parts of the .net framework like generics and whatnot regardless of what the underlying system is, is great!
Silverlight 1.0 was kind of a joke, and was nothing new since it still used javascript. 1.1 was a step forward, with being able to use C# and the subset of the .net framework. 2.0 I believe is going to be much better, with built in controls and whatnot.
Also, a silverlight app/content does not need to be clicked before giving it focus to then interact with.
i also do not understand the comparison that you’re trying to make. is this simply another example of techcrunch writing up stuff and not knowing much about it? did you bother to visit the AIR and Silverlight sites before you clicked ’submit’ ? that would have resolved this issue…
Thank you for using the correct term “slide” instead of the term “PowerPoint”.
“During Blair’s presentation was a slide on the companies developing AIR apps. Some we’ve…”
Adobe courted designers for a long time, slowly moving into the developer’s world (a big push from Flex). MSFT however is the master of providing tools to developers to keep them producing. What will be interesting is seeing their (huge) base of developers start to use silverlight. I work in a .NET development world exclusively and the devs I know are very interested in this. Try asking them to learn Flex (let alone Flash) would have them roll their eyes. Asking designers to start coding would have them rolling their eyes too. The worlds are moving together and this is an interesting time to see how and how much the two skills can overlap.
AIR doesn’t have to win any “format war”. It can replace Java and be successful. A lot of Java devs are jumping into ActionScript 3 over Silverlight because the languages are almost identical, and they have an aversion to Microsoft.
@16 “I’m shocked at the inaccuracies of this post and within some of the comments.”
You obviously haven’t read anything by Duncan before.
Silverlight 2.0 (whoa, quite a jump from 1.1 anyway) as a platform is technically now where Flash Player 6 was in 2003, the only exception being video quality. Sure, developers can choose from a big set of different programming languages to code for it, but for designers who are used to the possibilities of the Flash player this is something like a chef of a 3 star restaurant having to work in a burger joint.
For example: to my knowledge in Silverlight there is currently no way to embed fonts directly in the source, so if you don’t want to risk being sued by font foundries for offering their fonts as a free download on your site you’ll have to stick to the 9 default fonts that MS embedded in the plugin itself or you have to use pre-created bitmaps of your texts just like in the HTML days – not exactly the idea of a dynamic site.
There is also no support for bitmap manipulation, blend modes or filter effects, all ingrediences which allow Flash developers together with designers to create all those visually satisfying and impressive sites. I still have to see one Silverlight demo out there which shows that a designer has laid hand on it and not a coder. Until now I’ve only seen potato print style or PowerPoint chic.
While Adobe may currently have a competitive advantage versus Silverlight, the reality is that Microsoft’s master plan for Silverlight is much bugger – to turn the web into a Microsoft controlled environment.
What we are currently seeing is merely the first salvo of Microsoft’s competitive attack.
Microsoft will continue to use a potpourri of approaches such as buying hardware vendors and sweetheart deals with content providers in order to drive Silverlight adoption.
To crush Adobe is not Microsoft’s end-game. It has much bigger goals for Silverlight – to gain control of the core web technologies, thereby positioning itself to better compete against both Linux and Google.
Adobe paid for this guy to go to the launch and this was the best he could do?
I attended this event last night and the messaging was quite clear on the question of Air vs SL…there is no comparison. Period.
Either Duncan, you missed the panel discussion, or maybe the messaging wasn’t clear enough.
Flash vs SL – fair to compare. Both plug-in technologies, both (when SL matures) will be about numbers…developers and installer base.
AIR provides ‘occasionally connected’ desktop clients (permanently connected if ya like!). Very different from any SL messaging I have seen over the last 12 months.
Only MS could turn Adobe’s announcement into a promotion for their vaporware.
Flex and Flash are miles ahead of what anyone else is doing. They are here today and they work well. They are not cobbled together and they are being used today.
All you MS shills go hang at Digg.
Air still requires that you load software before you can run a projector, which really makes it not a projector. Zinc 3.0 is still leaps ahead of both of them for compiling apps like flash into a true stand alone projector that runs on Os X, Windoze and Linux all at once. Not to mention adding file system and mySQL calls directly to your flash or flex app which they natively do not support.
Zinc has been far superior for my projects.
stop comparing AIR with Silverlight 1.0
Silverlight 1.0 competes with Flash
MS has no product to complete with AIR at the moment but they will and it will be years behind.
AIR will be on linux this year … maybe mid year … beta before that of course. See http://blog.dig...try.com/?p=1289
MS doesn’t do linux… why do they give the monoproject responsibility to port Silverlight to linux? pathetic.
And those who keep saying Government doesn’t allow flash. go fuck yourself. you don’t work for the government you aren’t government contractors. you are talking shit. Some government organizations are stricter than others. They do Flex/Flash … don’t know about Silverlight.
Excuse my language.
Market did pick a favorite…its called AJAX.
We made Alertle…a completely single page application (its a RSS feed reader) which demonstrates to what heights AJAX can be taken to. Why would we need either Silverlight or AIR, when AJAX is “good enough” ?
http://www.alertle.com