Yesterday I mentioned that most providers in the platform-as-a-service space use AJAX for their underlying technology. Why? The current modus operandi in web applications is that standards are king and plug-ins are evil. There are a couple of complaints about plug-in based applications, but as you will see, neither hold much weight. Let’s examine the alleged infractions.
The first and perhaps most valid complaint is the required download and installation. Traditional web applications require only a browser (we’ll revisit this idea tomorrow) and currently, only 50% of web users have Silverlight (from riastats.com). However, this is up from 30% only 6 months ago (a 66% increase). Despite the rising usage of Silverlight, many organizations have not yet adopted it. That said, we have had no issues with customers deploying it and do not expect any problems in the foreseeable future. The underlying irony is that many of these competitors require Flash Player to be installed to view marketing content on their websites.
Using a plug-in like Flash or Silverlight instead of an open standard like AJAX/HTML makes a customer dependent on a specific vendor for their technology. The trendy catch phrase is vendor lock-in. The fear is that the vendor will stop supporting a specific platform or drop the technology altogether. Absurd. Both Flash and Silverlight are cross-platform and will continue to be. Flash has already been around for over a decade and Microsoft has invested heavily in Silverlight development for its own products. Neither are going anywhere anytime soon. The bottom line is that vendor lock-in is the natural result of product differentiation and the battle for customers will only escalate the competition in the coming years.
Come back tomorrow when we explore how this healthy competition will actually benefit the end users with a myriad of new and exciting features.