Via Mike Chambers (Apollo product mgr at Adobe), comes this snapshot of a comment made by Mark Anders of Adobe:

If you look at what Microsoft is doing with WPF, they say it's really about rich Internet applications but actually, I don't think it is, because I think rich Internet applications are not about Windows only. I think the Internet is about a multitude of machines and you do not always know what they are.

Mike then goes on to extoll the qualities of a true "rich internet application" and how <insert Adobe buzzword> is the shiznit. Naughty! Naughty! Macromedia/Adobe coined the term rich internet application (RIA) and can frame it to mean whatever the heck they want it to mean. Cross platform? Sure! Compelling experience? Yeah why not! Target a layer above the platform? Well, duh! Makes the OS irrelevant? Was it ever relevant to anybody outside Redmond anyway?

Students of logical fallacies will recognize Mark and Mike's argument as a classic Straw Man Argument. The modus operandi is thus: create a position that is easy to refute, then attribute that position to your opponent. Simple. But not straight.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is part of .NET Framework 3.0, the new managed code programming model for Windows. As a member of the WPF team, and specifically as one of the co-owners of the XAML Browser Application (XBAP) story, I haven���t made the connection between WPF / XBAPs with the so-called rich internet applications. I doubt anyone else on my team or others in Microsoft who swim in the WPF pool have ever positioned WPF/XBAPs as such.

But there���s no reason to let facts get in the way of a good Microsoft bashing.


Tags: WPF, RIA