Popfly - Mashup the web with Silverlight
Disclosure: This morning I announced that I'm working for Adobe. While I haven't officially started, consider me an Adobe employee for all intents and purposes. I have the disclosure statement at the bottom of the page, but I'll probably run …
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's Popfly launch lands mid-escalation in the rich-client runtime war: two days earlier the same corpus was mapping Apollo against Silverlight point by point, and in March GigaOM framed Apollo versus Firefox as an emerging battle for hybrid web/desktop apps. Sun had already positioned itself against both runtimes in May, so Popfly reads as Microsoft's answer to Apollo's public alpha — aimed at consumers rather than developers.
The story traveled unusually far for a beta announcement: TechCrunch, CNET, MSDN Blogs and Channel 9 all picked it up the same day, which tells you how much attention the Silverlight-versus-Flash question commanded at that moment. The wrinkle is the source itself — The Universal Desktop's author opens the post by disclosing he has accepted a position at Adobe, meaning one of the more-watched voices on the Apollo/Silverlight contest now sits on Adobe's payroll while writing about its chief rival's launch.
First-order effects
- Microsoft gains a consumer-friendly showcase for Silverlight at exactly the moment Adobe's Apollo alpha is courting Flash and Ajax developers, giving each runtime a flagship demo to argue with.
- The disclosing author's credibility as an independent analyst of the Adobe-Microsoft runtime fight is immediately compromised — readers must now weigh his Silverlight coverage knowing he considers himself an Adobe employee.
Second-order effects
- Adobe faces pressure to counter Popfly's drag-and-drop mashup pitch with something comparably approachable on Apollo, since Popfly demonstrates that the runtime war will be fought over end-user creation tools, not just developer frameworks.
- Microsoft gets a distribution argument inside enterprises where SharePoint already lives — a natural bundling path for a mashup builder built on its own runtime.
Third-order effects
- If consumer-accessible mashup builders prove out, application creation shifts further toward non-programmers, making the underlying runtime — Silverlight or Apollo/Flash — the strategic chokepoint rather than any single tool.
- Disclosure norms for industry bloggers become harder to ignore: as vendors hire the most influential commentators, coverage of platform wars increasingly doubles as advocacy, pushing readers toward corporate-published channels like MSDN for primary claims.
The trend: The browser-plugin wars of 2007 are being fought through consumer-facing creation tools — Popfly for Silverlight against Apollo's Flash-based stack — as Microsoft and Adobe compete to own both the runtime and the audience that builds on it.