Unlike the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray battle, where there can be only one, Flash and Air and Silverlight are all going to co-exist on the Web for a long, long time.

It is interesting to look at how they are different, and talk about which niche they each will end up inhabiting.

For the most part, consumers won’t care. I only mildly care whether the video is Flash or Quicktime or whatever (as long as it’s not RealPlayer); the point is to get the job done.  I suspect that Air and Silverlight will be the same, with most Internet users installing both frameworks.  Air is 11.2Mb, and Silverlight is going to be about 4Mb.  So if the user wants the content, they’ll install.

Really, this is all about the developer. 

Previously, if a software developer wanted a Rich Internet Application, no two ways about it, it was a royal pain in the . . . neck.  Pain to code, pain to test, and pain to maintain. Serious pain to maintain. All pain, whether you used Flash or AJAX or (insert your favorite framework here) whatever.

Silverlight is exciting because it removes that pain.  A developer can code in their native language (like C#) and also have the coolness of a vector environment in the browser.  But more importantly, the project can be maintained like a real software application in the enterprise.

So you are going to see Silverlight applications in the enterprise, on corporate intranets, where no developer in their right mind would put a Flash app.  You might even see Air applications in the enterprise, too, mostly in non-Microsoft shops.

I think Flash will stick around, because it’s great for lightweight designs.  If you have a small company and don’t have a catalog of 400,000 products to spin through, then Flash is great for image, and slickness, and that black-turtleneck type of site.  Plus, it’s fast and does great video.

I’m just glad about Silverlight, because Flash was never really made for industrial strength scalable apps (although it does have the coolness) and HTML based applications have always, always been a pain. When Silverlight 2.0 ships with user controls and network protocols and dynamic languages, it’s going to absolutely rock. After 13 or so years of the Web, the golden age of Rich Internet Apps is about to arrive.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  02/27  at  12:13 AM

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