For years, we’ve been saying that Google would be mad to build its own operating system. It should leave the thankless task to Microsoft and Apple and Linux distributions; you can debate how good a job they do, turn and turn about, but the scale of what a desktop OS needs to do and the range of devices it needs to support is far broader than what you need to do in a browser or on a smartphone. I still don’t think Google has any plans to create its own OS, but it’s pushing beyond the browser as a development platform with Gears and App Engine and the like. Microsoft has a whole range of platforms in the browser, out of the browser and around the browser, from Windows and WPF to Silverlight to SharePoint to Office to SQL Server – to name just a few of the platforms Bill Gates touched on in his last ever keynote at Microsoft TechEd this morning.

Silverlight is a lot of things, from Microsoft’s answer to Flash to Microsoft’s answer to Web based applications. Leave aside the video plugin side of it; the fact that Silverlight 2 (beta 2 due at the end of this week) runs .NET and programs written in dynamic languages on Mac and Linux as well as Windows is the most interesting part. And it’s not just for consumer Web apps; Facebook and Hotmail users aren’t happy with line of business apps in dreary basic grey when they get to work, and Silverlight is an easy way to spruce those up without slaving over a hot CSS schema for hours.

Adobe’s Air tackles much the same problem; how do you make powerful applications for the Web that work online and off, that look good and that work without installing anything (once you have the initial plugin or runtime). Air builds on Flex, so if you’re already writing Flash, you’ve got a head start. But there are a lot more .NET developers writing business apps, so although Microsoft demos consumer apps like the Crossfader social video sharing tool it talked about today, most Silverlight apps might show up at work, using Workflow Foundation and making data from SQL Server look good.

Silverlight is a subset of .NET and Windows Presentation Foundation, so developers are using familiar skills and Visual Studio plus Expression Blend for designers, who get to work on the live project, not in Photoshop mockups.  The visual development tools also appeal to disenfranchised Visual Basic developers who’ve been wondering what Microsoft has done for them lately….  Microsoft VP Soma Somasegar said Crossfader is being built by six developers and two designers in three months, which is more like Internet time than standard Microsoft time scales.

If Silverlight’s so good, why would anyone be creating Windows applications at all? Bill Gates finished his Q&A trying to balance that question. “Yes, you’ll be able to do amazing things in Silverlight, but there will always be things that you can do in Windows Presentation Framework that you can’t do in Silverlight. Why is that so? Well, it’s so because with WPF we get to assume we have the full power of the PC; we’re not just running in a browser environment. So, take things like 3D type things, virtual world type things, take things like ink recognition or playing video back at arbitrary speeds. WPF will, because it can connect in to all of Windows, expose those services and let people do new things.

“We need to keep the Silverlight download to be fairly modest. So, if you think of what that will be versus the entire Windows environment, we have a much bigger runtime to call on. So, we’re not saying that those get absolutely merged, but we will have exactly the right relationship. And even as you’re in Visual Studio or in the Expression tools, you’ll be able to say I want to author for the Silverlight piece and to let you know that if you’re sticking to the things that work in that world.

“Silverlight will probably have almost everything WPF has today, but WPF will keep getting richer and richer as we go forward.”

That’s the Microsoft dream and it’s one direction things could go. Google is pushing in completely the other direction. Last week at Google IO, Chris Prince and Aaron Boodman (better known as the designer of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension) were explaining why they don’t want you to think of Gears as taking Google applications offline. Yes it does that, but actually Google wants it to give Web apps to have access to all the capabilities of your PC the way desktop apps do. Why shouldn’t the browser get the power of your 2GHz processor and your 300GB hard drive? Why shouldn’t they be able to send you notifications in another window or show a progress bar? Why can’t you access USB drives from inside Gears or use a GPS to tell the Web app where you are?

Google filed its name off Gears so that it has more chance of becoming a standard, either as part of HTML 5 or by becoming ubiquitous as a plugin in its own right. Personally, I’m not going to be installing it on any machine I use.

It’s not just because it has no way to limit the amount of disk space it’s going to take for its local database (used by MySpace to give you search across the whole site without having to take up space on their data centre for those pesky index files). It’s only partly because it’s going to be able to use your GPS or other tools to get your location and there is currently nothing to warn the user and no options for choosing if and when Gears can get your location. Google seems committed to harmonizing with whatever standards HTML 5 includes for the things that Gears does, and I’m not the one who will have to detail with duplicate APIs from Gears and HTML 5 to do the same thing – that’s a problem for Web developers to juggle. And the fact that Web sites like YouSendIt already have real progress bars without needing me to download a plugin is a quibble rather than a complaint.

Mainly, I won’t use it at this point because of how Chris Prince explains why he thinks Web apps are so good in the first place. “Everything in the browser is inherently safe,” he said at Google IO. “There is no cost to install a Web app, you’re not afraid to click a link, and you can navigate away with no fear it will take over your machine.” Compared to the near-paranoia that’s is Microsoft’s attitude to the Web, from the phishing filter to the way IE doesn’t get the same privileges as a desktop app to the security-first attitude that permeates the company, calling the browser ‘inherently safe’ seems a little laissez faire to me.

Adding binary data files to JavaScript will certainly make for more powerful apps. Some of them might be Trojans; if Gears gets everything Google talked about that would be able to scrape files off a USB stick, record you talking with the audio APIs, add in your physical location and do whatever you can think of with it all, good or bad. If I’m not too busy playing with whatever features the Web app disguising the Trojan has I can navigate away from it – but if it’s using Gears to run offline, has it gone away?

The browser sandbox limits the features on my system that Web apps have access to. That’s a pain when you want to build a better app in the browser – but it’s a security measure if you want to build a better way of attacking my system. I asked Chris Wilson of the Internet Explorer dev team if I was being paranoid – he was the one who’d raised the issue about privacy with the GPS location in Gears at the end of the session. Maybe, he suggested - but with the number of security issues it raises, Gears isn’t going to be installed by default with IE any time soon…

With Firefox 3 around the corner, and IE 8 in beta, perhaps its time to call this round of browser wars over before they’ve begun. Adobe’s put a line in the sand today with the beta of Photoshop Express, and there’s no way a pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript browser can ever cross it - no matter how much of ACID3 it can render.

Why?

Microsoft and Adobe are pushing innovative web application development outside the browser into cross-platform runtimes that deliver everything that Java promised. HTML is obsolete, and all we really need is the <object> tag.

One of the big announcements at Microsoft’s web development conference Mix08 was the public beta of Silverlight 2. It’s another salvo in the developing rivalry between Microsoft and Adobe. Both companies are treading on the same path as they struggle to find direction in the developing software as a service world. Adobe’s made its latest step today, with a Flash-based in-browser version of Photoshop built using its Flex platform. Both companies are targeting developers with their rich internet applications strategies, offering platforms for next generation web applications that go beyond the limitations of HTML and web browsers.

Silverlight 2 is Microsoft’s first cut at a high-performance in-browser rich internet application platform. Flash may well perform well if you’re using the Flash 9 player, but noit everyone writes well-architected Flex applications, and the Flash/Flex designer/developer dichotomy is a tricky one to deal with. Not everyone can write an application like Photoshop Express, and the capabilities of Flash are being lost in a morass of advertising animations that mean a lot of influential users block Flash from their browsers completely…

Microsoft is watching Adobe carefully, and it’s trying not to make the same mistakes. While Silverlight is designed to be used by advertisers (and comes with plug-ins suitable for most analytics platforms), it’s also developer friendly. Install Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 2 SDK and you’ve suddenly got a tool that lets you write C# code that runs at desktop speeds inside a browser - and on Macs as well as Windows boxes. There’s no point in codeing for a host of incompatible browsers if you can target a plug-in that’ll work across a sizeable set of your target userbase.

You’re going to need to write code if you’re planning on using Silverlight in anger. Deep Zoom, one of the Mix 08 Silverlight announcments, may only take a line of code to implement in your XAML - but you’ll need a lot more in the associated code to actually work with browser, mouse and keyboard to actually handle the zooming… Microsoft is a developer-focused business, and even though its attempting to redress this with its Expression family of tools, you’re going to need Visual Studio to get the most out of Silverlight.

Photoshop Express is a good idea - and a powerful tool. Could you build it in Silverlight as well as Flash/Flex? The answer’s quite simple: Yes. It’d probably run faster too, as Silverlight has a threading model that’s not there in the current generation of the Flash player. This time next year, well, who’s to say. Flash 10 will have probably changed the game yet again. One things certain: you couldn’t build it in HTML.

There’s something for everyone in the competing RIA platforms. That’s a good thing, as it’ll mean better user experiences for everyone - and a step back from the current round of browser wars. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe wil take competition outside the browser and into the development platform. The next step, well that’s most likely to happen where it’s needed most - server side.

–Simon

I’ve just spent a few days in sunny San Jose and a surprisingly sunny San Francisco (Mark Twain is reputed to have described a San Francisco summer as “the coldest winter I’ve ever had”) talking to what’s possibly Silicon Valley’s oldest up and coming little software company.

You probably know them, as their software’s going to be on your PC – whether it’s a Windows box, a shiny Mac OS X machine, or a sleek utilitarian Linux workstation. It might be surprising to hear Adobe described as a start-up, but that’s the feel I get from the folk who’ve just managed to pull off one of the most successful mergers in the history of IT.

Most pundits would have written off Adobe’s merger with Macromedia as a disaster well on the way to happening. After all, these were two companies with a very different ethos, both damaged by the dotcom crash. They’d been vicious competitors, firing off lawsuits, and building applications that directly targeted each other’s sweet spots.

That was yesterday.

Today the new Adobe is a company that’s been refreshed by the merger, and one that’s about to take on the biggest guys on the block – both Apple and Microsoft (adding IBM and Sun into the mix for further entertainment value). It’s planning on doing it with a surprisingly simple concept – turning the ubiquitous Flash player (now on more than 90% of PCs) into a lightweight, cross-OS application platform. Installed with Microsoft and Apple’s browsers, Flash is about to become the IT industry’s most daring Trojan horse.

Adobe’s already used it to deliver its own video conferencing applications, and Macromedia’s Central was an experiment that showed what developers would expect from a Flash-based application platform. There’s been a lot of success with Flex, a developer-centric version of Flash that throws away the timeline in favour of a more understandable state-based approach to application development. Flex is already delivering many effective web applications – including Yahoo!’s Maps. There’s just one problem with Flex (and other Web 2.0 toolkits): the browser.

It’s time, as Adobe might put it, for a breath of fresh AIR. Web 2.0 was only the warm up – the real deal is bringing web applications outside the browser, and turning them into desktop applications. The current beta of AIR is an impressively small piece of code, and it can host AJAX JavaScript applications and Flash applications built using Adobe’s Flex development tools. There’s even a SQLlite database for persistent data. You can build AIR applications from Flash CS3 or Dreamweaver – or if you don’t want to be tied in to Adobe’s design and development tools, you can use my current web development tool of choice: the free Eclipse-based Aptana JavaScript development tools.

I’ve been playing with some AIR applications (as well as building some of my own), and one of the outstanding implementations is eBay’s San Dimas tool. EBay’s in an awkward position – its web site is starting to show its age, but it’s also a tool that thousands of people use as the basis of their businesses. It can’t redesign the site taking advantage of Web 2.0 without alienating at least a large percentage of its most lucrative users. Caught between a rock and a hard place, eBay has been working with design consultancy Effective UI to build a new application on top of its existing web services. Instead of working with OS-specific development tools, eBay’s been able to use one codebase and AIR to produce an application for both OS X and Windows that can help you buy (and eventually) sell online. The result will be a desktop application for eBay’s casual users that lets them search, bid, and make a few sales. The old web site can continue running for years, with pro users happily using their custom tools and power selling features.

There’s more to come with AIR – as well as working with web APIs it can use your PCs file system, and some of your attached hardware. There are still some kinks to be ironed out here, both in warning users just what their latest applications want to do with their systems, and in making sure that files stay in a secure user space.

Developers are going to want more from the AIR development tools, too. The current state model in Flex Builder is a start, but if we’re to build complex user interfaces in AIR, we’re going to need a better way of showing just how states relate to each other, and how applications translate between states.

The best thing about AIR is that it isn’t alone. Sun is developing a lightweight Java client framework, while Google’s Gears let browser applications run online. There’s plenty of competition here, and plenty of choice. It’s a diverse ecosystem that should drive development all the faster. Cross platform client development will be simplified – making it easier and cheaper for businesses to roll out new desktop applications.

It’s a brave new world, and one that’s turned an old man of the industry into a dynamic start up. Let’s see what it does to everyone else.