Mozilla, Adobe and Silverlight. Shall we dance?

No doubt you've seen the Prism announcement by Mozilla. Quite an interesting move in this chess game we call "The Software Industry". Personally, I'm not sure what the end game for Mozilla is anymore and I'm sure If I look hard enough I'll find that answer.

Mike Chambers at Adobe put up a post essentially stating why he thinks AIR isn't being treated fairly by the Mozilla folks (welcome to the "my competitor takes shots at me" party ). I get his point(s), but I was surprised to see him say this:

"...Maybe we need to do a better job of getting that info out there, but I would expect (and suspect) that someone working on a similar project would know that..." - Mike Chambers.

Surprised simply because it illustrates for me that AIR as a concept has many hurdles ahead of it, and not only do I disagree with it's "approach" to the market, but now that it has a competitor that's non-Microsoft, it's yet another battlefront they will have to face and a unified messaging front is overdue.

To put into perspective, Adobe needs to approach their competitors differently, and Mike's latest blog post didn't do him any favors (I understood his points, I in part agreed with him, but never ever pick a fight with Mozilla crowd as that product as emotional bonds associated to it, and you will lose - except if you're this guy). I think competition in this space is really going to push us all that much faster in terms of doing better online and to me the web tomorrow is going to exceed my expectations of today.

I agree with Mike on this comment:

"..Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, we’re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web..." - Mozilla

hmm, seems like the same execution model as both Microsoft and Adobe, only the boundaries have slightly shifted. "Not a runtime, but the agent that houses in the runtime" to which I ask you these days in our RIA world.. which is the agent and which is the runtime. Silverlight and AIR are separate, but that's been said before and yet people continue to link them together. That interests me as is it a case of "they want Silverlight to have desktop functionality" or is it a case of "no idea, but they are both x-platform so it makes sense to marry the two".

Interesting..