Daily Archives: October 22, 2007

internet, microsoft, software development, web authoring

A tale of two Adobe conferences

I am just back from Adobe’s MAX Europe. The previous Macromedia/Adobe conference I attended was Macromedia DevCon in 2002. Remarkably, the gold sponsors at the earlier conference included Microsoft, there to promote .NET technology to Dreamweaver designers. Such a sponsorship seems impossible now. Back in 2002, the big product announcement was Contribute, and its competition was FrontPage. Today, it’s war. Adobe is talking “platform”: hosted services, web applications, desktop applications, and none of it dependent on Windows; while Microsoft has suddenly got the cross-platform habit with its own Flash-like browser plug-in called Silverlight. On Adobe’s side, an amazing, ubiquitous, graphically-rich runtime that just works. On Microsoft’s side, huge resources and armies of .NET developers.

Max Europe was a good conference. There’s a buzz around the products, and I didn’t meet any disappointed delegates, although there was a little bit of concern that strong designer content was getting squeezed out by the new focus on developers. The Adobe speakers seemed very approachable, and I appreciated the willingness of senior executives to talk to the press. In fact, the company has retained something of a small company feel, at least among the ex-Macromedia team which seemed to dominate at MAX. Adobe also has a clearer focus than Microsoft, which comes over as more bureaucratic and internally conflicted.

Nevertheless, it is possible that some at Adobe are under-estimating Silverlight. One speaker assured us that it only runs in one browser (false). Flex Builder is slow and awkward in comparison to Visual Studio. Adobe does have a big advantage in mobile devices – Nokia was at MAX and is putting Flash in all its high-end phones – but I am not yet convinced of the merits of Flash Mobile.

Mac count at MAX: about 50-50 with Windows on a very rough estimate. That’s proportionally fewer Macs than at FOWA earlier this month, which was maybe 80% Apple.

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Now I understand what a rich internet application is

For a while now I’ve been puzzling over what exactly is meant by the term “Rich Internet Application” or RIA. Microsoft wants the initials to stand for “Rich Interactive Application” but it is losing that battle – see this great post by Dare Obasanjo. It is Adobe’s term, but it has never been clear to me exactly what it means. I’ve seen it refer to everything from internet-connected desktop applications, to Flash applications running in the browser, or even plain old HTML and JavaScript.

The way to understand a term is to look at its origin, and here I got a big clue from Adobe’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch. At a press briefing during Adobe Max Europe last week, Lynch described what happened:

The whole move of Adobe to rich internet applications was actually driven by the community. It was people using the Flash player about 2001, 2002, to start creating not just interactive media or animation experiences, but application experiences. The first one at that time was something called the Broadmoor Hotel reservation system. It was a 5 or 6 page HTML process to check out and they were having a lot of drop off. They turned that into a one-screen check out process in Flash, and they saw their reservations increase by 50%. We actually named that trend. We thought OK, we can do more to support that, and we called it Rich Internet Applications. Then we focused on enabling more of those to be made with these technologies, so a new virtual machine in Flash player, the Flex framework, Flex Builder, all of that was driven by some of those early developers who were pushing the boundaries.

So there you have it. The Broadmoor hotel case study, which I recall seeing demonstrated at the 2002 Macromedia devcon, was apparently a significant influence on the evolution of the Flash player. The first press release about it was in November 2001. The case study is still online, and the application is still around today.

I don’t think we will get closer than this to a definition. Adobe will continue to use it to mean Flash applications; Microsoft will continue to try and de-brand it – the same way it tried to use “blogcast” in place of “podcast”, according to this article. I tend to agree that the concept is bigger than Adobe; but language is organic and cannot be so easily manipulated.