Wired:The real riches in any boom, as everyone knows but so few capitalise on, go to the toolmakers - those who sell the shovels to the gold-diggers. This month saw the two commercial giants of the sector, Microsoft and Adobe, make a bid to be the one true shovel makers of "Web 2.0" craze, writes Danny O'Brien.
I don't think either will make it, though, they face far too much competition from the web itself.
Deliberately or not, both companies launched their heavily-branded next generation web authoring products within a few days of each other. Adobe announced the excitingly-named "Apollo" on the 15th, followed swiftly by Microsoft announcing its more lunar "Silverlight".
Both were aimed at coders and companies eager to produce "rich internet applications" (RIAs). You reach them by typing an address into your web browser, but they don't look like web pages as we know them. Instead they act more like desktop applications, responding instantly to mouse and key presses, and instead of statically sitting there, loading up fresh data and displaying it whenever they feel the urge.
Writing such web pages is a tricky business, involving connecting a lot of established web technologies - the browser, the web server, and the html that creates a page - in new and somewhat convoluted ways. Both Microsoft and Adobe see this as an area where they can provide some simplicity and clarity; and both have some reason for thinking they can rule this domain.
After all, Microsoft has been making tools for programmers to create applications since before they were in the Windows and Office businesses. And Adobe is the king of one of the biggest platforms for running RIAs - Flash, the stuff of YouTube movies, silly time-wasting web games, and, occasionally, more serious fare.
Microsoft and Adobe's contributions build on this past expertise. Microsoft's offering, Silverlight, is a packaging of two of their previous desktop technologies which have been used to create standard Windows applications. One is XAML, which lets designers specify how an application will look independently of the deep code that actually determines how it works. The other is the .NET runtime - a way, at least in theory, to write and execute complex programmes without having to worry about the details of the machine that they run on.
Cram both of those into a web browser plugin, and you have a way of writing code that's not a million miles from how you'd write a Windows application, but have it run in anyone's web browser - whether they're on a Windows machine or not.
Adobe approaches the new world from its own backyard, too. Apollo combines Adobe's PDF and Flash technologies. Both of these traditionally run these days within the web browser, but Apollo lets you run them outside of the browser, as though they were another standard desktop application, such as Word or Minesweeper. Programmers used to writing for Flash can now escape the browser, and compete with coders who design exclusively for Windows or the Mac interface. Microsoft lets desktop applications become more webby; Adobe lets web applications become more desktoppy.
You may notice the irony in both of these applications: in attempting to invade the other's turf, both Microsoft and Adobe appear to have galloped straight past each other. Microsoft is leveraging the desktop skills of its traditional market to storm the browser application world; Adobe is using all those expert Flash programmers, and rousing them to march in Microsoft's territory and get their Flash apps working on the desktop.
I'd say that both companies are fighting the battles of the last war. Adobe, a company that makes its money from desktop tools, has always lived in terror of Microsoft creating a Photoshop-killer, just like almost every one of the other desktop app companies (like Lotus, or dBase). Microsoft, on the other hand, controls the browser but has never managed to control its contents.
Alien technologies such as Sun's Java, Adobe's Flash, Apache's webserver and Mozilla's Firefox still permeate the world wide web, much to Bill Gates's irritation.
Meanwhile, neither software giant seems to have understood the real toolmaking truth of this particular boom: the prospectors are making, and sharing, the shovels for themselves.
The action on desktop applications is relatively moribund these days (with the exception of some exciting work on the MacOS platform). All of the real excitement is taking place on the web. And there the boom's leading figures are all using tools that are free to use. Most of the cutting-edge applications use code written in Javascript (which you can need no tools to write, and can learn from examining other web developers' pages).
The heavy-lifting work is generally provided by programming languages such as Python or Ruby, which you can download for free, and get started with in minutes. In these cases, the competition isn't between Adobe's $500 products, or Microsoft's $800 Visual Studio.
The competition is between the dozens of free tools that exist online, and the communities eager to encourage new coders to join them.
Once again, it's not clear how these big companies can compete with free. For now, they seem happy to burn marketing dollars trying to compete with each other.
