Silly season
Springtime means conference time, which means it's silly season on the web again. Adobe introduced Apollo, their latest attempt to recreate the web in their own image. Apollo is based on Adobe's own markup language, Adobe's own runtime, Adobe's own graphics and animation framework …
Context & Ripple Effects
Adobe's Apollo has been building all spring: a public alpha shipped in March, demoed with live Flex apps at Mashup University at MIT in January, and immediately framed by GigaOM as the opening of an Apollo-versus-Firefox battle over hybrid web/desktop applications. The same week's rich-versus-reach analysis set up Adobe and Microsoft as the two biggest players in rich internet application technology, with developer experimentation just beginning.
Against that backdrop of mostly positive blogosphere reaction — and an Adobe communications strategy that leaned on Robert Scoble as its blogger — Mark Pilgrim's 'silly season' post lands as the sharpest dissent: Apollo isn't extending the web but recreating it wholesale, on Adobe's own markup language, Adobe's own runtime, and Adobe's own graphics and animation framework.
First-order effects
- Developers evaluating the Apollo alpha now face an explicit fork: build cross-platform hybrid apps inside Adobe's proprietary stack, or stay on the open web stack that Firefox and browsers generally represent.
- Adobe's launch narrative — amplified through its blogger strategy — meets its first substantive technical critique, forcing the company to defend why a closed markup-plus-runtime-plus-graphics stack is necessary.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft, already positioned in March coverage as the other major RIA player, faces the same critique vector: any rival platform built on vendor-owned runtimes inherits the argument that the web is being re-created in someone's image.
- The Apollo-vs-Firefox framing shifts from a browser-reach question to a standards question — whether hybrid desktop-web apps route around HTML and the browser or depend on a single vendor's runtime.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the rich internet application layer consolidates around two or three vertically integrated vendor stacks rather than shared open standards, making runtime ownership — not page reach — the competitive axis for the desktop-web boundary.
- A credible counter-tradition forms within the web community itself: prominent developers publicly policing where platforms substitute proprietary re-implementations for web standards, raising the cost of purely closed RIA strategies.
The trend: Rich internet application platforms are pulling the web toward vendor-owned runtimes, with each 2007 announcement sharpening the contest between proprietary stacks and the open browser.