You are doing a lot more in tools and, of course, Microsoft is very strong in tools and they're doing more with Web development as well. How do you compete with that big machine over at Redmond?
Lynch: We've actually had a long relationship with Microsoft. So there are areas where we cooperate in their areas; where we compete we are one of the biggest software vendors on Windows in the world.
The areas that we do compete, in Web tooling for example, we've been competing for a long time. In the early days of Web authoring, I worked on the Dreamweaver project at the time and we were basically last to market. FrontPage was already out, there were already a dozen tools already out there. None of them had really had gotten predominance or really popular with pro Web developers and there was an opening for us to do that. We got in and designed a tool that really resonated with a community. We listened well and fed that feedback in. That managed to get an incredible level of popularity really fast. What we saw there was great success with Dreamweaver with pro-Web developers that beat FrontPage and other tools.
So even though Microsoft works on software, they don't always win in these markets. From what I've seen in these situations, you just have to be close to the customer, not be distracted by what the competition is doing in terms of trying to catch up with you or whatever, and stay on the leading edge and think about the next thing that is happening. And let the competition chase where you've been.
For us in the rich Internet application space, that's brought us more into developer tools. Things like Flex Builder, that's a new tool for us and it's doing very well. We've made the Flex Framework open-source and free. A lot of the frameworks for the Web now, of course are free and open-source. So to play, that's kind of the table stakes. So we've anted up.
Thermo (a planned tool to let designers write their own Web applications) got a lot oohs and aahs from attendees. But people have been trying to make development tools for people who aren't programmers for a long time, probably as long as code has been around. What are the limitations there?
Lynch: I know! But we're not doing a general solution for anyone to build an application. That's one of the key things--we had to be specific about who the audience is. It will remain a holy grail for anyone in the world to decide I'm going to write a rich Internet application today and to do that.
So it's just for designers?
Lynch: Exactly. It's for people who are using tools like Illustrator or Photoshop and have a background in interface design and want to create a great experience for someone. But they are primarily a designer. Right now they work in partnership with developers and the way workflow works today, you create a comp--a composition--in Photoshop, a picture of what you'd like, and you hand it over to a developer to try to make it look like that. We've made some of the workflow work more seamlessly already.
But what Thermo does is it makes it so the designer can not only draw what the application looks like, but they can also add the interactivity for how it works.
The magic of what we're showing with Thermo right now is that you can select elements that are just pictures on the drawing and you can say this actually represents a list box, or this represents a text edit field and we put the logic to convert the picture into a work component.
To fully complete an application you need to connect data--connecting back into Web services, loading XML. Thermo doesn't go that far.
When you talk to people at Google which is very influential in Web development, they say they avoid Flash whenever they can and prefer using lowest common denominator technologies--JavaScript, Ajax. Is that a concern that developers are pushing the envelope in Ajax and staying away from Flash and maybe AIR?
Lynch: No, it's not a concern. First of all, AIR supports Ajax and Flash and Flex and PDF. So if you're using any of those technologies, AIR is designed to run that code. If you're purely an Ajax developer, AIR is fully supportive of that and you can create first-class applications with that. I talk about betting on the Web and that means both HTML and Ajax and Flash and PDF--all the stuff that people are really using on the Web today. To the extent that people are building applications (for the Web) I think...it's the right direction and we're going to work to enable that.
I hope that Google starts seeing more opportunities to use interactive media in application design, especially as they start producing more sophisticated applications. In terms of usability of those applications in the user interface design, I think we can help with some richer runtime technology. There's also a philosophical choice to how much you want to use a rich interface or keep it extremely bare.
From the development point of view, using JavaScript in the browser is not that simple. You really need to be a sophisticated developer to do that.
Do you see more potential in the enterprise of these kinds of applications?
Lynch: AIR's value proposition is very similar to enterprises as it is to end-users. You can use those same technologies but deploy them as desktop applications and one of the things that's important in enterprises, is that you can update those applications from your server where it came from. Just like the Web, you can get that new application with auto update so it solves the deployment problem. But you also get to have desktop integration, which enterprises want to have. We kind of lost that (with the Web).
Flash is the dominant video format on the Web. Now Microsoft has Silverlight and they are signing on partners. How do you want to stay ahead?
Lynch: Right now, Flash is far in the lead so it will be difficult for any technology to get the kind of adoption that Flash has right now on the Web. We were able to start in the early days of the Web and there's a lot of use of it that has caused its adoption.
Now we're in a situation where we can add more functionality into Flash, and in a year we get 90 percent of the world to update. No other client technology is in that situation right now, not Windows or Internet Explorer or any other technology. So it's going to be tough.
But we're not resting on our laurels at all. The Flash team is moving very fast.
Where do you expect AIR to go? In a couple of years, will most applications be written with AIR?
Lynch: I hope so! Potentially. Because most applications are being written for the Web and we're bringing those applications to the desktop with AIR, there's nothing really else out there right now (for that). I think that AIR is positioned early to really be a leader on that, kind of like Flash was positioned early as the interactive multimedia leader.
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