November 1st, 2007
Knowledge@Wharton on Google, Adobe, and Microsoft and RIAs
There is an excellent rundown of the three biggest rich Internet application players right now - Google, Adobe, and Microsoft - in Knowledge@Wharton. I thought it did a good job of explaining where these companies are coming from and also got some good feedback from a variety of Wharton professors who had a lot of praise for Microsoft’s view of software and services. It sums up very well (maybe unintentionally) why this is such a fun space.
One thing the article does a great job of illustrating is how different the three approaches are and that each company is coming at things from their position of strength. Google is very, very browser-centric so their offerings tend to be online only and are heavily tied to the cloud. Microsoft has years of desktop experience and is leveraging all of that in their RIA push. They see a lot of benefit in keeping a majority of the processing power and storage on the desktop but providing the flexibility and freedom that comes with the web through a number of different online services. By tying those online services (such as Office Live Workspace and some of the other Windows Live products) to their desktop counterparts, you get a workflow that transitions pretty seamlessly between web and desktop. Adobe on the other had has always kind of been the middle of the road. We make a ton of money on our desktop software but we’ve always been a presence on the web with things like Flash, PDF and server software like ColdFusion. The browser-desktop hybrid solutions like AIR are representative of that.
One thing the article does a very good job on is how these companies are going to make money. Google and Microsoft both monetize their platform very well. Google can afford to give away everything for free because they make it up on advertising. Microsoft sells the operating system that all of their desktop applications run on. Adobe so far is selling tools that support developers and designers to their platform. One look at the three market caps shows why Adobe is moving into things like Adobe Share and Buzzword which place a heavy emphasis on a great experience and collaboration.
In the end, that’s what this is all about - a great experience. The platform that provides that to the end user will be the “winner” but it’s still a long way off. For now I think the company doing the best job of letting it’s designer and developer communities create cool stuff will win. In that area the dichotomies are changed. Microsoft and Google have tremendous developer communities while most of the designers are using Adobe’s tools. How that divide plays out will be one of the interesting subplots in the future of software.
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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