In a later show, my colleague and MSFT UX Evangelist, Josh Holmes, talks about his good working relationship with his counterparts at Adobe. He makes the point that as long as we focus on building better software for end users (especially better user experiences), good things will happen, regardless of which platform you’re using. There is so much room for improvement in UX design that we’re better off focusing on that and learning from each other than on arguing much about the merits of one platform over another. I will bow to his wisdom there …

Cheers.

There is a huge perception–even among those in the Adobe community–that “Flash” means “Skip Intro” and “annoying animations”. I believe Adobe has done an inconsistent PR job of explaining how Flex fits into that picture.

There is a common belief among many Flex developers that ‘on a dime’ the number of Silverlight Developers will trump the number of Flex developers due to it’s integration w/ the rest of the Microsoft stack. Your comments seem to make me think that is true.

No other comments, though.

However, the expression “That Flash Guy” actually comes from companies I work with … Flash seems quite “other” to most shops I work with – even ones that use Flash.

While Flex may in fact be a fine development environment for teams, it is far more likely that an enterprise development team already has the .NET expertise required for Silverlight development than the expertise required to create a Flash app (especially if that enterprise is already using ASP.NET for web development, which is quite common). You have to consider what the other tiers are likely to be written in. The overall experience of developing in .NET and Visual Studio is excellent and CONSISTENT across Silverlight, ASP.NET, Azure, desktop, server, mobile, Office, etc.

There is clearly a perception in the companies I work with that Flash/Flex is more for “pretty” stuff than for line-of-business applications. I think Silverlight has an advantage there, both in perception and in reality.

For full disclosure, the day after I made the blanket statement you refer to, I came across quite a nice Enterprise app whose front end was made in Flash/Flex, so I can no longer say that I don’t know of any.

I am trying not to focus on “challenging” competitors on the podcast any longer … it’s just not a good forum for that. Instead, I’m trying to focus on what’s positive about our platform. So … nothing against Flash/Flex – I just think Silverlight rocks

As a Flex / Flash Platform Developer, it is amusing to hear the “other side” talk about technology.

You mentioned that inside a firewall, for enterprise applications, penetration of the player is a non-issue. I agree! If that is your deployment model the questions to ask are “Do have the technology to run this app?” and if no, “Can we get / deploy / install the technology to runt his app.”

However, you mentioned that Silverlight allows more people to work on projects than just going to “That Flash Guy.” Flex is a programmer’s way to make swf files and it was designed for application development; not graphic design.

You also mentioned that you don’t know of anyone using Flash for business applications. That doesn’t surprise me because I would expect the penetration of Flash business apps inside Microsoft are slim. However, there are plenty of companies out there using Flash for business apps, thanks to Flex. The numbers seem to be increasing significantly over the past 5 years. Everyone I know is doing it; although those are the circles I run in.

Thanks!