Microsoft has just launched Popfly, the alpha of their new web page/mashup/widget content creation tool that uses their new Silverlight rich application engine. With tooling like Popfly, Silverlight is going to absolutely cream Flash. Flash apps are a pain to build, especially data-driven flash applications, and are expensive to deploy. Popfly and Silverlight significantly lower the bar for creating rich Internet applications, and let developers share components via a social network to boot.
After many skirmishes over the years (TrueType vs. Postscript, XPS vs. PDF), Microsoft finally has Adobe on its home turf. The growth in the content market is online - there is a more money going towards building a rich, interactive web property than a four color brochure. In order to create rich, interactive web properties, you need developer tools, and developer tools are Microsoft's sweetspot and Adobe's Achilles heel (checked out Flex lately? Yech!).
Yes, the black turtleneck crowd will still use Photoshop and Illustrator on their Macs, but the developers building the websites are going to run from Flash like rats fleeing off a ship, and the server revenue is going to go from Adobe to Microsoft. Game over.
Nice comeback from Microsoft. The industry definitely needs a counterweight to Google, so I am not surprised that people are suddenly more receptive to Microsoft's platform plays.
About Me
- Peter Yared
- Peter Yared is the CTO of CBS Interactive and was previously the founder and CEO of four e-commerce and marketing infrastructure companies that were acquired by Sun, VMware, Webtrends and TigerLogic. Peter's software has powered brands from Fidelity to Home Depot to Lady Gaga. At Sun, Peter was the CTO of the Application Server Division and the CTO of the Liberty federated identity consortium. Peter is the inventor of several patents on core Internet infrastructure including federated single sign on and dynamic data requests. Peter began programming games and utilities at age 10, and started his career developing systems for government agencies. Peter regularly writes about technology trends for CNET and VentureBeat and has also written for BusinessWeek, AdWeek and InfoWorld.
2 comments:
Seems like there's lots of black turtleneck developers these days. Personally, I think anyone who has a decent story for Windows and Mac is going to clean up. Linux? Got that too? Icing.
Doesn't look like Popfly is going to run on mac, but can't quite tell.
Yah now, if Popfly fricken ran on Silverlight ...
Patrick - Popfly does run on Silverlight, and runs on Windows and Mac.
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