July 2nd, 2007
Does the Rich Internet Application "battle" hinge on rich media?
Robert Scoble has his first article up for FastCompany and he talks about Rich Internet Applications. Specifically he talks about what Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun are doing to support these new kinds of applications. Robert comes at it from an interesting angle. He’s a big video guy, so understandably he focuses on the video features of these different platforms. Hist article got me thinking and it seems that in the short term, the big Rich Internet Application battles are going to be over rich media.
Rich media has always been at the forefront of Rich Internet Applications. Partly it is because native web technologies like HTML and JavaScript just can’t DO rich media, so if you wanted it, you had to look to another platform. And before Flash video came along, getting video to work on the web was a bit like trying to run a foot-race on ice. You may have finished half the time, but it looked really ugly while you were doing it. But the expanding reach of broadband and the video capabilities in Flash came together at a fortuitous time and helped jump start the web video revolution. That revolution has turned into big business to the tune of a 1.6 billion dollar price tag for YouTube, the web video darling. Now a bunch of companies want in on the seamless rich media pie and because we expect our rich platforms to have some pizzaz above and beyond video, the Rich Internet Application race is in full swing.
That isn’t to say that the overall experience and design of applications isn’t important, because it is. I just don’t think it’s the main driver of RIA technologies. Eventually it will be. When users are surrounded by operating systems like Vista and Leopard, they are going to come to expect a richer software experience. Right now the web alone won’t be able to provide that, so Rich Internet Applications will become much more common than they are today. Eventually it will get to the point where today’s web applications will just look silly when compared to the next generation of applications built with RIAs. But even though we’re seeing the beginnings of some very expressive examples of software, that still doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor for developers or users (as much as it pains me to say that).
So in the short term, the majority of web developers are going to be looking to enhance current web properties with rich media. That’s where Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX (though the story on JavaFX isn’t as well defined), and Quicktime (Robert forgot about Apple) are all going to compete with each other and why there is so much energy going into telling the web video story. The Silverlight 1.0 beta has a great codec and a fantastic video story. We (Adobe) just announced 1080p full screen video as part of the Flash Player and Apple continues to push Quicktime, a great format for video. So things are heating up and I think Robert is a good barometer of who is winning. He’s been working with web video for a long time, so he’s a good person to ask about what to expect and what’s important.
Luckily for all of us, there are still some fantastic examples of RIAs being created every day that take advantage of the entire feature set, including rich media, for all of the major platforms. That keeps pushing the edge so that in the not so distant future, when rich media becomes something of an afterthought, we can have some great discussions about ways to build better looking software and give users an overall better experience.
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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