journal

The buzz is gaining momentum. The first major battle in the web 2.0 war is about to be won. And the first shot wasn’t fired by Google or Apple… it was Adobe. And Microsoft is not a bit happy, internally in a couple key teams, I’ve even heard they’re absolutely concerned.

In a few weeks Adobe is probably going to release their graphics and web software bundle. Along with this massive package which includes the behemoth Photoshop, Adobe will be releasing its newly acquired Flash 9 product which will sound the alarm bells over at Microsoft. Flash 9 is going to ring in two other Flash based products Apollo and Flex. Apollo connects Flash to the operating system and Flex simplifies Flash application development. Two very incredible ingredients to Adobe’s RIA takeover of the web. In short these technologies disconnect Flash from the standard internet browser like Firefox and run on virtually any major operating system. And of course, this would worry Microsoft and there is a BIG reason for this. If you had a bunch of free software apps like Word and Excel totally for free on the intenet, kinda like Virtual Ubiquity’s new word processor, why would you want to buy Microsoft Office? And why buy anything from Microsoft or Apple period. And better yet, why would you need an operating system at all?

Microsoft is frantically trying to develop and promote their own version of Flash called Windows Presentation Foundation, but right now it just doesn’t stand up to the features Flash has built up over the years. And in all reality, Microsoft has been completely asleep at the wheel. They’ve been very focused on their core products that they missed what the little graphics company in the corner was doing.

Hell, Microsoft is even voicing the open source developer community concerns - I’d also like to note that old Scoble is trying to point out incorrectly that Flash is not open source.