Anticlue

One for the Desktop, One for the Web

On Jesse Ezell's blog there is a very interesting post about the differences between LongHorn and Flex.

The gist of it is that Microsoft is focusing on the PC and developing applications for the PC and Macromedia is focusing on a web based solution. Some very good points are raised within the posting.

Personal preference is that I prefer a web based solution. I've been there, done that with dll hell, and I would like to avoid it in the future. It is a waste of time and money to go update 30 -200 department PCs manually. How often a year do we do that, not as often as needed because of the manpower required. On average for vendor thick client applications, we update the PC's three times a year. Some vendors go as high as 9 updates a year, others as low as 1. Why don't we automate the push down? Because the vendor with the most frequent updates software package doesn't work that way, it has a bug from the vendor and still doesn't work. (And people complain about microsoft)

The other item is vendor applications arguing with other applications. Sure you can use our product on the pc, just don't bring up MS excel at the same time. Your PC will crash. Why? something conflicts somewhere, but we are researching it.

Yeah, I'll stick with the browser based applications when the solution is available.