Every so often there occurs what could be described as a ‘phase change’ in the IT industry.  New technologies come along, bandwidths increase, business models change and suddenly new battle lines have been drawn. Such a phase change is happening right now. The field of play is the Internet. The main players are Microsoft (as always), Adobe and a number of service providers dominated by the likes of Google, e-Bay and Yahoo.

Play is concentrated in three areas. At the client end it is about going beyond the browser to create applications that combine the advantages of the Web with the richness of the desktop. Macromedia was an old hand in this arena with Flash Player, which is now in Adobe’s arsenal. However Microsoft has muscled in with Silverlight which extends its .NET plaform out to the Apple Macintosh and browsers other than Internet Explorer (see page 4). Furthermore the Mono project has already started work on a Linux implementation (codenamed ‘Moonlight’). Adobe has also fielded Apollo, which is looking to bypass the browser altogether (see page 5), while Sun is making sure it has a place in the game with JavaFX. The fact that most of these technologies haven’t even made Beta yet shows how serious these guys are.

The second area involves the tools we’re being given to develop these applications. While Adobe is very strong at the creative end of the market, particularly with its new CS3 range (see pages 5 and 16), it is going to have a hard time competing with Microsoft’s mighty Visual Studio and the sheer scope and consistency of .NET 3.0. Whether Adobe Flex and Flash can hold their own against such competition has yet to be seen. Furthermore, Microsoft’s Expression Studio is calling out to the hearts and minds of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop and Illustrator users everywhere.

The third area is the ‘cloud’ where the services that drive these applications live. The strongest player is Google with its advertising platform giving us a business model, and applications like Google Earth showing what the company can deliver client-side. Adobe doesn’t have a presence here yet but Microsoft is clearly eyeing up the field, as Jon Honeyball found at MIX07 (see page 36). It has already announced a hosting service for Silverlight applications and is paying a very large sum to acquire online advertising company aQuantive. If it was to add to that portfolio - say - credit card processing facilities, then it would have a clear advantage in this space. These are interesting times - let’s hope it remains this competitive!