Laszlo Expands Series C With An Extra $6.6 Million

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1. The Hater
   

   March 6th, 2008 at 11:10 pm

   Ugh, Laszlo. LZX files made my life hell for nine months. There are much, much better RIAs than Laszlo; this move does not make sense to me at all.

2. Greg
   

   March 6th, 2008 at 11:39 pm

   Laszlo is awesome, if you know how to use it. I am building an app and using the best of Flash technology and the best of DHTML technology all with a single codebase under Laszlo. It’s pretty great.

3. Venkateswaran
   

   March 6th, 2008 at 11:43 pm

   laszlo is a very good and simple platform to develop RIA

4. Market Window
   

   March 6th, 2008 at 11:59 pm

   Boys ‘n Girls, Laszlo is a lesson on “window of opportunity”. Theirs was in 2003, in the pre-Royale days, when the market forces had not yet declared any dominant RIA stacks.

   Today, Laszlo is no more than Curl or 37 Signals — a consulting shop with some cool technology on the side to give them an edge over other consulting shops.

   It’s a pity, really. There are numerous things they could’ve done to outmaneuver the the MACR behemoth — standardize LZX, drive creative pricing models (not the 20+K/CPU “standard way of doing things”, etc.), build a stronger developer community around it at all costs (”developers, developers, developers!”), etc

   Today, betting against either Flex or the Silverlight/WPF/Whatever-else-MSFT-will-throw-at-it stacks is suicide.

   Where else will you get the greatest support? The greatest level of innovation?

   It’s identical to why Java and .NET are still the dominant platforms today, if not necessarily the most innovative. The two have the biggest communities around them, and those are almost impossible to displace.

5. Market Window
   

   March 7th, 2008 at 12:06 am

   That reminds me, if I were the one putting money in, I’d start to look at ways of selling the company. Look at Curl — cool technology, and they ultimately found a suitor overseas. Perhaps a larger consulting shop in the US or Europe would bite? (Bearing Point, Accenture, TIBCO, etc)

6. James Gardiner
   

   March 7th, 2008 at 12:17 am

   No 4. Market Window , Right on. you got it in a nutshell.
   Looked at Lazlo a while ago. Interesting, but Adobe is on such a role right now. Flex is VERY good and Silverlight will defiantly be important in the future.

   Tho, I see Adobe with its open source methodology behind Flex being a very dominant player. Microsoft does too. Look at the catch-up game they are playing and the cash they are throughing at Silverlight to get traction as fast as possible.

   When you have a tool just as good as Microsoft’s, running on open source, at a much better price, and with a very good community and developer base… It is a no brainer..

   James

7. Nick Bolton
   

   March 7th, 2008 at 12:45 am

   No. 4, I don’t think OpenLaszlo is trying to bet against what ever technology becomes dominant, but rather it’s a way of covering your bases with a single codebase which compiles currently to Flash, DHTML and in the future, probably Silverlight.

   So, in a way I’d say it’s a way of future proofing your RIA apps.

   We’ve done a complex OpenLaszlo app and it runs just like a Flex app runs in Flash. If we want to deliver it in DHTML then fine, it’s a no brainer.

   So, with OpenLaszlo it’s not really a fight against which RIA is going to succeed because it supports them anyway.

8. Jnan Dash
   

   March 7th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

   There are far better RIA platforms for enterprise scale applications and Ajax is no tthe answer. It’s a remnant of the past. Ajax is just a phrase but the technology is old hat - javascript, css, dom,…
   For tomorrow’s RIA, what is needed is superior scalability, very high performance, and offline capability. Adobe is trying ot get there with AIR. Just check the MIT-research-based product Curl that addresses such needs with 300 customers in Asia successfully deploying it today.
   Hence VC’s pouring money to Laszlo only shows how poorly informed they are.

9. Experience Provider
   

   March 9th, 2008 at 6:07 am

   Truly, I don’t understand the technical pros and cons of these different RIA solutions, but I do know that Laszlo’s Digital Life Suite seems to be focused on the right stakeholder group — the end-user.

   Many developers don’t appreciate the need to elevate their focal point above the applications layer, to the experience layer. The most superior technology doesn’t ensure an engaging consumer experience — with simplicity built-in, by design (instead of an afterthought).

   Developers who intend to gain access to the broadband service provider marketplace would be wise learn more about the current human factors or usability roadblocks for mainstream users, and solve those problems first.

   IMHO, the remnant of the past that needs to be cast aside is perhaps the developer community that still builds products and services without an appreciation of the full spectrum of possibilities between the least and most skilled user within their addressable market.