Back in a Flash

But with the merger with Adobe Systems scheduled to take place later this year, the executives at Macromedia, most notably chief software architect Kevin Lynch, are beginning to feel that they may actually have the institutional fortitude and expanded product line needed to challenge Microsoft for dominance of the next generation of Web applications.

Just about every where you go on the Web, it's pretty much a boring two dimensional landscape filled with applications that pretty much look like a variation of the same electronic form.

What the Internet needs in general is burst of productivity driven by a new generation of three-dimensional applications that will bring the data that we are all drowning in to life. Those applications will be graphically richer in a way that allows us to more easily see the context between disparate points of data, while adding audio and video capabilities that significantly enhance the user experience.

Macromedia, coupled with the PDF and Web content tools developed by Adobe, hopes to be the platform that those types of application are built on by delivering a next generation of its Flash multimedia player, codenamed Maelstrom.

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Maelstrom, which will run across everything from a cell phone to a Windows PC, is positioned to lock horns with Microsoft's Avalon project, which is a new user interface framework that Microsoft is building for Longhorn, the next major upgrade to the Windows platform.

The challenge that Microsoft faces with Avalon, named for an area in England that was once a sacred place for ancient Druids that today is considered a center for New Age enlightenment, is that Avalon may prove to be more fantasy than reality.

The issue facing Microsoft is that people are going to want a seamless experience with Web-based applications regardless of the platform they are using. That means that the experience they have using a PC to access an application should closely approximate the experience they have using a cell phone to access the same application. That's a difficult thing to deliver when the Windows platform is not ubiquitous outside of the existing PC space.

There's no question that this industry needs to get the average user excited about the Internet and technology again if it is to grow faster than the rate of growth we're seeing in our anemic economy. To make that happen, we really need new application paradigms that start to deliver on the real potential of the Internet.

An at the moment, the leading candidate to fuel that growth is the Flash platform, which Kevin Lynch as the chief software architect for Adobe following the merger, will finally be in a position to deliver. And the downstream effects of that for the industry as a whole could be just the thing needed to take information technology to the long awaited next level.