February 5th, 2007
The heroes of i-Technology
I didn't see Jeremy's post last year about the heroes of i-Technology, but I caught it this year, and it's a fun trip into history and a worthwhile exercise in putting today into perspective. As Jeremy says, in his quest to identify the Top 20 i-Technologists, the problem is not too few candidates, but too many. His list now includes 100 nominations and from an RIA standpoint, there are a couple of big ones.
Tim Bray: Tim is the man behind XML and as a result, has had a big impact on RIAs. Without XML as a way to extract and isolate content, RIAs couldn't be as effective. One of the beauty of Rich Internet Applications is that it enables a "pretty face" on web content, and much of that content is delivered as XML.
Jon Gay: Jon was the "Father of Flash" and I think an excellent choice for the top 20. No matter what you think of Flash, you can't deny that it changed the web. It's helped make it more interactive, ushered in the growth of video, and in the process helped put the importance of experience into web applications. Jon is now running his own company, Software As Art, and as Robert Hall noted, it looks like he's keeping very busy.
Bill Gates: As I see it, Bill has to be in any top 20, but he's also impacted RIAs in a big way. With Vista, Bill helped put the focus back on a good experience (some would say to compete with Apple) and it resulted in a big shift at Microsoft. They've gotten into design tools, they're trying to enable great looking applications, and they're giving Adobe some competition in a space that Adobe has dominated for so long. Bill was a big driver of that long before Ray Ozzie came along, and I hope that legacy continues.
There are a lot of other people on the list that have had an impact, and I don't envy Jeremy's job of trying to turn this into a Top 20 list. John Warnock of Adobe, Tim Berners-Lee, Tim O'Reilly, and Brendan Eich are some of the names that jump out in addition to the people I highlighted above. I wouldn't be surprised to see Kevin Lynch on that list down the road because of how he's helped transform Flash and driven technologies like Apollo which will impact software. All in all, technology comes from a rich history and it continues to build on that foundation.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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