Ted Patrick, Flex Evangelist for Adobe, has a nice outlook of his vision of what’s to come for Web2.0.

There’s no doubt that as an Adobe employee he may not be entirely objective. However, I think his views could be quite accurate if the Flex/Flash (Flesh) framework becomes the de facto standard for web apps. It’s difficult to predict how likely that is or how much of the market Flesh will end up with. There are many indicators which would seem to favor that outcome:

1-Flash video is an overwhelming success. Using anything else these days is rapidly becoming a joke. The result is that it has created a more positive atmosphere for Flash. So web design shops and individuals are finding it increasingly important to put Flash video into their skill set. The biggest downside to Flash video these days is that it isn’t exactly a no brainer to make the video work. Most people won’t want to use the Flash video component because they’ll want their own skinning. So, they’ll have to learn a little bit of coding here and there. The upside to that is these developer/designers will now have a little more experience with Flash and will be more likely to use it for other projects.

2-Vista has slipped and along with it Windows Presentation Foundation/Atlas. Flex is out there and is picking up steam by the day. Any hope they might have of stealing away support for Flex is waning. There’s no doubt that WPF will have wide support because most of the current crop of .Net developers are likely to pick it up. But as time goes by that number will wain. The Windows platform isn’t going to get any bigger than it is today. The best case scenario is that it will wane slowly until a new equilibrium is found between Windows/Apple/Linux. But anyone who thinks that the current percentages are going to hold is fooling themselves.

3-Apollo (homepage), the Flash as application platform, is about to launch. I think Apollo will be as revolutionary to the Internet as broadband in the home was.
Comments:

“The solo Internet experience is dead and social applications have highlighted the importance of shared experience.”

No doubt. The Internet is about to become as much a shared experience as World of Warcraft.

“We will see applications that let users work online or offline seamlessly.”

This isn’t going to be the easiest feature in the world to enable. I have no doubt that the success of many websites will hinge around how well they enable this feature.

“We will see applications that seamlessly integrate audio, video, images, animation, data, and text.”