Penetration in the AIR

In my humble opinion, Adobe has done a great job in encouraging developers to consider AIR as a desktop application development platform. Applications are sexy, you can leverage your HTML/Ajax/CSS skills, and now with Flex Builder 3 and AIR Introspector in the pipeline, we have everything we need… well, ALMOST everything we need.

Parleys.com AIR client

But of course, having everything that we need to build AIR applications is not enough, because we’re not the only people involved. We have other actors to convince, mainly our bosses and our users. Our bosses because when you’re building a product for a company, adding new technologies like Flex, ActionScript and AIR, has consequences in terms of maintainability, in terms of the number of resources you can find on the job market, in terms of the budget that has to be assigned to training. For that of course, the reference argument is very efficient, and Adobe has done a great job on that too. When you can tell your boss that NASDAQ, eBay, Google and many other big companies they’re admiring are using such technologies, it helps a lot in convincing them.

But I think that there is one target that is still to be addressed: users. Of course, when the application you’re building is targetted at corporate users within the company, once your manager is convinced, it’s almost done. It’s just a matter of adding the AIR runtime to the next company-wide software update. But what if your users are normal people who don’t care about installing a runtime, who are even afraid of installing new stuff when it’s not smileys or search bar addons? When you build a product for those people, natural penetration rate is vital. And from the last figures we got, “only” half-a-million people have already installed the beta AIR runtime. And something needs to be done to encourage people to install the final version, to improve this penetration rate.

I asked the question to James Ward and Serge Jespers, and their answer was basically “it’s free, we’re talking with Sony and for the rest, if you want it in Windows or MacOSX, mail Bill or Steve and ask them”. And that’s an annoying answer. Because I can’t believe that those companies don’t talk to each other, especially Apple and Adobe. But it looks like when they do, they’re ashamed of it, because they are competitors. It’s like partnerships and synergies are a shame.

Well, let’s hope that all those shiny applications will encourage people to get the runtime and it can be even more interesting to develop new shiny applications, and so goes the virtuous circle.

What do you think? What could be done to spread the AIR runtime?

PS: If you’re like me and you really want to have EVERYTHING to build Flex and AIR applications, you can’t vote for the JIRA issue because it’s been deferred. But James told us that you can file a new issue referencing this one and they will add a vote to it. And who knows? Maybe they will get it done before Flex 4 ;o)

My name is Sébastien Arbogast, I’m 26 and I’m an IT consultant for Axen in Brussels, Belgium. I’ve been working there since I graduated in Computer Science Engineering from the “Institut National des Sciences Appliquées” in Rennes, France. Sebastien is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 24 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.