Battle of the RIA platform

Adobe used to be the undisputed leader in the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) space until Microsoft entered the market with SilverLight. Today Adobe has just announced the release of Adobe AIR and Flex 3 products and with Microsoft soon to release SilverLight 2.0 the RIA battle is heating up between the two rivals. How will these 2 vendors woe customers into using their respective RIA technologies?

The Adobe story:
- Proven technology, Adobe has their flash plug in practically every browser that’s connected to the internet.
- Cross platform and browser capability
- Appeal: Adobe as a company has several “designer” – hence the product is by designer for designers
- Their products have dominated the RIA market and this release strengthens the capabilities of existing products.

The Microsoft Story:
- SilverLight 1.0 was a big step for Microsoft, however SilverLight doesn’t enjoy the level of installation base as Adobe
- SilverLight is currently supported by IE and Safari (planned support for FireFox), Microsoft has tied up with Novel to develop plugins for other browsers. SilverLight is leveraging only a subset of .NET - .NET 4.0 “Profiles” will be driven by requirements from SilverLight
- Appeal: Microsoft is essentially a developer company – and hence with SilverLight support for .NET will appeal to many of the .NET developers. Microsoft has done a good job with the Expressions suite and will attract several designer as well with the product. Microsoft with support for ASP.NET AJAX, SilverLight, XBAP and full blown WPF has a compelling user interface story for a wide variety of user interfaces all supporting .NET framework.

Microsoft to announce SilverLight 2.0 in a couple of days time during Mix08 should be interesting space to watch.