Ted on Rich with Reach

Ted Patrick (Adobe) posted his scorecard on a mixture of current and upcoming web based offerings and how they stack in terms of Rich and Reach.

Others (myself included) disagree with the results as they kind of are skewed more towards Adobe's favor then any of the others and while I'm glad Ted's passionate about the products he represents it does send a narrow focused signal  (I'd wager if anyone from Microsoft.com had of done the same, it would be of been a PR nightmare per say - ie we would of been crucified for it).

I'm meeting Ted this week at WebDU and I'm thinking I need to educate the lad on WPF and WPF/e but do so in a manner that will help the conversation between Adobe and Microsoft more. I'll be sure to do it over beers that way if I tell a fib or two, it will be "due to the drink ya`s honor" and what not.

In reality though, WPF and WPF/e have a lot more to offer then what Ted has indicated and I would of preferred to have seen a "here-now" scorecard from Ted then "here-now with a dash or two of upcoming potential".

Quotes like:

"...while being 100% cross-platform compatible. In allowing a single binary .AIR file to run cross-platform on Windows, OSX, and Linux we are going to see a revolution occur..." - Ted Patrick @ Adobe

I can get a handle on his thought process around it but the reality and going by the facts, it's still in Alpha (going into Beta). The current features in Alpha aren't much to write home about and even that aside, the problem hasn't changed in terms of Adobe FLEX itself.

The development cycles and adoption of FLEX still need to occur pre-Apollo, and the shell extension may bring in new talent (stress may) but the adoption barriers with FLEX haven't changed and it's likely Apollo development is going to still inherit these (for obvious reasons).

In reality though, the race is to early to call these days, and it's going to be a wait-n-see game for the next 12-18months for both Microsoft and Adobe (point: to early for scorecards)

Florian Krüsch made a great comment on this post and I think it summarises the average punters feeling(s) on the matter.

"Ted, I don't agree on your ratings but I don't expect you to come up with something realistic comparing your - Adobe - technology to the competitor.

I've been a Flash developer for a long time and I've also had the chance to help building a revolutionary WPF based ecommerce experience.
Comparing WPF to Flash 9, WPF adds way more than 1 point on my scale.
First off you got 3D which is huge.

You got documents, which you have in Apollo as well but not in Flash. But most of all you got integration on into the whole .NET framework, web-services, XSLT, database access, native interop, networking... you name it. " - Florian Krüsch

At any rate, its an opinion worth reading at the very least as he did have some substance to the post and if it promotes healthy discussions around both sets of toys, I'm all for it.