[..]To avoid any confusion, here’s a little cheat sheet:

- Adobe AIR is a runtime
- Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin
- Adobe Flash Player is a browser plugin[..]

http://fahimilyas.blogspot.com/2008/05/road-to-silverlight-part-1.html
http://fahimilyas.blogspot.com/2008/05/road-to-silverlight-part-ii-flex-vs.html

Can I suggest you add these to your cheat sheet?
- Adobe Flash Lite is a mobile presentation layer technology
- Microsoft Silverlight might come to a mobile browser… er, what did you call it?

Cheers.

http://dnjonline.com/article.aspx?ID=nov07_adobeair

great response! I absolutely agree with you on that. Until now Silverlight is just a “technical myth” which hasn’t reached the end-users at all. Version 1 was just… a preview in my opinion. The second version is more the one who should be kept in mind. The past shows us that MS has the power (and for sure the money) to leave market leaders behind: Palm, Sony, …

I think we can all be happy that Flash has become a part of Adobe. With this company and the ongoing plans of open-source from Adobe itself and the community projects it will be more powerful than ever before.

I am not saying that Microsoft is deliberately spreading mistruths, though they don’t seem to be very active in dispelling the widespread myths when it is in their favour.

For that matter I don’t think AIR vs WPF / .NET is a better comparison apart from the two being runtimes — no reasonable thinking person would believe these two have the same feature set nor will likely ever become as powerful. What the Adobe Integrated Runtime allows is using web technologies to deploy cross platform desktop applications. That is an important selling point to those of us that do RIA development which is not necessarily the same developer base as those involved in the .NET stack.

Both companies have some compelling solutions, what bothers me is that a lot of the reporting being done bases its analysis on a poor understanding of what these technologies are and how they relate and/or differ from each other.

Thanks for all the feedback!

Your statement AIR != Silverlight is correct but it is not correct that it compares to WPF. WPF is just a part of Microsoft’s RUNTIME: .NET

AIR should be compared to .NET (both are runtimes)
&
Flash should be compared to Silverlight (both are plugins)

I love Flash since the good old days and the current movement into new possibilities are absolutely amazing… but I do know the power of .NET and only from the technical view: Flash developers who don’t know .NET have no clue of this stunning amount of functionalities (not to mention the great MSDN and it’s perfect reference). Hopefully Adobe makes a big step forward with the new capabilities of FP10 (Astro).

Silverlight is comparable be Flashplayer!
WPF is comparable be another desktop application tecnology (AIR is still poor if compare him with another desktop application).