You know what surprises me, besides the fact that people actually watch baseball? It’s that very few people see Adobe a threat to Microsoft. I’ll bet “the guys” at MS see it coming.

Remember back in the mid 90s when Java was tauted is a Windows killer? What ever happened to that? We’ll, for one thing, Java was supposed to be a ‘write once, run everywhere’ tool. But, that never really came to fruition.

Flash is a write once, run everywhere tool. Of course there is that dreaded plugin drawback. You know, that piece of software that is only on 95%+ of all the PCs on the planet. That piece of software that can update itself without user interaction. That’s the part that really sucks about Flash. There are just a few people in the world that don’t have it.

Hey, I have a great idea for a TV series. There would be two main characters. One is a really bright guy who is kind of dorky in a hyper intelligent sort of way. He’s sort of “out there” if you know what I mean. He just makes leaps of intellectual faith but always seems to be right. The other character should be a good looking, but not great looking, woman. She’s the scientist, the skeptic. These two have been teamed up to search the world for users who don’t have the Flash plugin. Maybe there could be an overarching story based on an evil software company that is involved in a worldwide conspiracy to kill the Flash plugin. I’m sure it would be a big hit.

Here’s how the landscape appears right now: Microsoft is coming out with Explorer 7 and their Atlas framework for developing AJAX apps. It is supposed to be cross browser friendly, but which browsers? There is also the Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), formerly code name “Avalon” that we’ll see in Vista. Reportedly “Avalon” will be an optional download for XP users but at what cost to performance?

There is no doubt that WPF will be a rich development environment. At the same time it will be new to every developer out there. As a developer you have to learn a new technology to write apps that will only run on Vista. With the launch of Vista slipping to early 2007 it will miss the ‘06 holidays. That coupled with the prediction that PC sales will slip later in the decade mean that Vista isn’t going to have a good adoption rate.

So, are you the developer going to spend countless hours learning a new development tool for a small and slowly growing audience? Well, you’ll probably have to, right? If you’re into writing desktop apps then this is obviously the future. Or is it?

Adobe is coming out with their Apollo program. (If you haven’t read much about it then just search “adobe apollo” at Google news and you’ll get lots of hits.) You can think of Apollo as Flash for the desktop. Interestingly enough Apollo will go public around the same time that Vista ships. You want to bet on adoption rates? There is no way Vista will keep up with Apollo.

Here’s the kicker: I mentioned at the start that back in the mid 90s Java was tauted as the Windows killer. Well, that might just happen if Flash/Apollo become all they can be because the Flash player 9 is written in Java.