YA-OS Killer
First, allow me to state that while having never played with Adobe AIR or Flex 3 I’m sure they’re fine products and many people I respect seem to thoroughly enjoy them. However Hank Williams seems to think they’re going to kill Windows in Adobe Introduces Windows Killer (also over on CenterNetworks):
What Adobe is doing is building a platform to replace all operating systems as a development target, and the implications of this are profound.
For most applications it does not make sense to write directly to the OS any more.
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Adobe AIR is a tool that allows developers to build Flex applications or HTML/Javascript applications that work on the desktop but have access to the Internet and can synchronize between the web and the desktop when offline.
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Adobe’s strategy is a death stroke to Windows as a strategic monopolistic platform.
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RIP Windows 2008.
I appreciate the sentiment (and even the unspoken “OS X Killer / Linux Killer” nature of it) however two things bug me about the hyperbole in Hank’s statements:
- Windows et al. are operating systems yet Hank is really talking about application-space. Big, big difference there. As great as Flash is it needs something to sit between it and the networking hardware (
unless Adobe’s also created their own OS underneath AIR?) and that’s going to be either Windows or Mac OS or Linux. Desktop app killer? Perhaps. OS killer? I don’t see how. - Write once, run anywhere (WORA) on the desktop has thus far failed on both fronts. The track record of this genre is not so great. Whither Java.
Hank also makes no mention of that pesky elephant in the room of WORA: usability and ubiquity of user interface. It would be great to think “hey, my next web site can really be a desktop app and I’ll sell it for millions to all users!” but I suspect that AIR apps that look like Windows apps will flop with OS X users and AIR apps created by Linux users will be inscrutable and unusable by anyone but Linux users (ok I kid… actually I don’t).
On the other hand MySpace is wildly successful and it proudly presents steaming piles of shit for a UI so who the hell knows.
Update: AIR is a slick wrapper for the WebKit rendering engine, SQLite, and a ton of custom HTML and OS-specific code underneath it. Not only is AIR not an “OS killer”, it’s extremely heavily dependent on the underlying OS.