Microsoft vs. Adobe: Round 0.2

[jducoeur]

Remember how I mentioned, a few weeks back, that Adobe was taking a direct run at Microsoft with their new Apollo platform, a pseudo-OS based on Flash? Well, now the other shoe is dropping: Microsoft is starting to talk about WPF/Everywhere, their Flash-killer. It's a fairly modest download and plugin for the browser (like Flash), allowing you to build rich UIs in the Web environment (like Flash). It claims to run on all the major platforms, including Mac and Firefox (like Flash). You write the UIs in a mix of XAML (their Firefox-like GUI language) and Javascript (pretty much like Flex, which is the new high-level layer of Flash), using designer-oriented tools (like Flash).

Like I said: everyone's been paying so much attention to Microsoft vs. Linux and Microsoft vs. Apple and Microsoft vs. Firefox, that they've been missing the really *interesting* fight that's brewing. Both sides are finishing their warmups now, and I'm taking my ringside seat, popcorn in hand, to see whether either of these big bruisers manages to land any good body-blows on the other...

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Want to make a side-bet on whether either of them even tries to make their version accessible?

[jducoeur]

Hmm. Well, a quick Google search doesn't exactly fill me with confidence on either point, so no...

[be-well-lowell.livejournal.com]

This sense of "rich UIs" is antithetical to the idea of accessible computing. The whole point is to make the content unusable except in exactly the way the "designers" wanted to present it.