The Nonzero-Sumness of RIA Platforms
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
In an industry that seems to thrive on competition, it’s natural to think that the three major RIA platforms are incompatible, directly competing technologies, and that an application that uses one, will preclude the use of the other two. After all, an application written in Silverlight is one less application that could potentially be written in JavaFX.
Right?
This would be true if application development were a Zero-Sum Game, which it sometimes is, but not in the case of RIA development.
RIA platforms are currently the underdogs of adoption when compared to general web application development. When it comes time to choose a technology stack for a new project, it is often assembled based on (among many other things) what is familiar, and what others are using — and these days the default stack is web-based.
On the occasion that the requirements demand something that current web technology can’t easily accommodate, a RIA solution may slip into the mix and cross-pollinate with an existing web app. When this happens, the general awareness, and acceptance of RIA technology rises a bit more, and with it, expectation that future applications will follow suit.
Every project that uses Flex, JavaFX, or Silverlight increases the user’s expectation of how applications should behave and what’s possible. Soon users may come to expect the ability to run an application offline, out of the browser, or on a mobile device, and the higher the user expectation, the higher the demand for this type of development.
Put another way, RIA platforms have the task of not only trying to increase adoption, but also of generating the demand and raising awareness for the technology itself. This is much easier done collectively then as individual platforms.
In other words, RIA Platforms are playing a Nonzero-sum game between each other: that which benefits one, benefits all.
For this reason it is good, from an adoption standpoint, that the three RIA platforms keep pace with each other’s feature set. For example, while Mobile support may be perceived as a differentiator for JavaFX, it’s actually a good thing (and I’m sure not completely non-coincidental) that Flex and Silverlight have Mobile support planned in the near future. The reason is simply that if more applications have mobile components, the expectation, and therefore demand for this style of application, will rise. So if a project ends up using JavaFX Mobile (for example), it is not a net-loss for Flex or Silverlight, as two more mobile RIA projects may appear that would not have otherwise been there based on the demand created by the initial project.
Neal Ford hinted toward a similar trend in dynamic languages in his talk “JRuby vs. Groovy”. Despite the antagonistic title, Neal warned that if developers don’t realize that the ecosystem is big enough for both languages, neither may thrive. In other words, two seemingly competitive technologies are dependent on each other for survival as long as both benefit from the other’s successes.
There may come a time when the RIA space is so saturated that the game may switch to zero-sum, much like the current state of web application development. There may come a time when the phrase “desktop-like experience” actually refers to technology that runs on the desktop.
For now though, the task of mass adoption is far too great a challenge for any one platform. They are better off acknowledging their potential win-win situation of co-adoption.
2 Responses to “The Nonzero-Sumness of RIA Platforms”
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I’m not sure I get the point. Is there a big turf war between JavaFX, Flex and Silverlight, which needs to be quelled for the benefit of all three?
@David — thanks for the comment. The point I’m simply trying to make is that underdog, competing technologies can (perhaps counter-intuitively) benefit from each others’ successes.
It’s not really an original point. I’ve probably just been reading too much Robert Wright.