I wanted to check in here from Adobe MAX. It has been an extremely well attended, and well organized conference. The venue here in Chicago is superb, and the Adobe folks have really done an outstanding job in accommodating the more than 4000 attendees.

The theme of the conference has very much been the RIA revolution that Adobe (Macromedia) birthed several years ago, and has looked over as the standard bearer ever since. It has been fascinating to me to sit in on sessions like, "Future Strategies in Enterprise" and see Flash discussed as a fully matured solution for delivering cross-platform applications both behind the firewall and beyond. Six years ago, when Pier first started building business-level applications in Flash, we had a tremendously difficult time convincing business owners and other stakeholders that Flash proffered the best option for delivering compelling, intuitive, and efficient user experiences. We argued then that if you could deliver a better and more logical user interface, it would translate into greater efficiency in completing tasks, lower training times, lower support cost, and more compelling experiences. At the time, that was very much a hunch, today it is very simply the standard.

Along with the Flash player and Acrobat Reader, Adobe has focused this conference heavily on its newest runtime called AIR - the Adobe Integrated Runtime - which will allow application developers to deploy web-based applications on the desktop. This technology aims to, in a sense, realign the software development paradigm. It promises to take the relatively cheap and agile web development model, paired with the web's ubiquity as it applies to distribution and maintenance, and apply it to desktop software. So what has traditionally been an extremely complex and time-consuming process fraught with lots of loose ends can now be significantly more flexible and web-enabled. This means that desktop applications will more readily integrate with value-added web services (we may even see a valuable mashup or two based on public API's sometime soon) and the entire user interface and interaction model of applications will more closely resemble the web. In the words of Ray Ozzie, it will get companies thinking about "software AND a service."

For our part, Pier has been digging deep into the possibilities of this new technology. For the last 6 months, we have been working on an exciting new application built on AIR for enterprise sales organizations. Ever mobile and occasionally connected sales men and women will see a big benefit from bringing a web-based toolkit to their desktop so that they can work on and offline. In addition, the business owners of these organizations will see the benefit of being able to get data from and send data to this toolkit seamlessly.

The web-enabled desktop platform will give them better IP protection, increased mobility, and greater return on their marketing investment. It's an exciting new world, the value of which we are just beginning to understand. MAX 2007 has been an important touchstone in starting to define that value.

Michael Colombo

Partner, PIER