The New Web War?

The New Web War – “Inside Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun’s fight to power the next wave of rich Internet applications.
I acknowledge the Robert Scoble is a prominent (albeit annoying), technology blogger. He seems enthusiastic about his field and he writes consistently and thoroughly on his site, Scobleizer.
But what the hell is he talking about in his new article for Fast Company?
He says there is a Web War between the rich internet applications of Adobe, Microsoft and IBM. That’s like saying there’s an digital music player “war” between the iPod (100 million sold, April 2007), the Zune (1 million sold, July 2007) and the Samsung YH-925GS (the what?).
Let’s get this straight. There is no RIA war right now. Let’s please drop the the hyperbole. Of three technologies mentioned in the article, there is one leading RIA contender right now and that is Adobe Flash. I’m not going to even acknowledge Microsoft Silverlight or IBM JavaFX because, number one – there’s no usage/penetration statistics on either Silverlight or JavaFX. Number two – once Silverlight and JavaFX start getting implemented and picked up by users, then we can call it a competition, not a war.

The Real Issue

What people should really be thinking about is how companies like Google and Adobe are changing the paradigm of software deployment and usage by making them web-based RIA’s and how entrenched leaders like Microsoft are going to respond when it won’t matter whether you’re on a Mac, PC or Linux computer.