jd/adobe

I completely agree that demand for RIA has been growing over the last couple of years – I like to think that we (and plenty of others) were the pioneers of RIA and that we helped to stimulate this demand. But, lets not forget, that in the early days this was hard work and significant effort was required to get some customers to understand the potential ROI from investing in user experience. What I was alluding to in this post was that more and more customers are recognising the value of differentiation through experience and that 2007 marks the tipping point where agencies are seeing significant customer-driven demand for Rich Interactive Applications.

Regarding the term Rich Interactive Applications, I don’t think it’s fair (on this occasion) to say that Microsoft has redefined it – I believe that Ovum were the first define RIA with Interactive rather than Internet, and since then it has been picked up and used by others also.

As you say, there is far more than just Vista and Office 2007 driving user expectations; but, in terms of broad impact, Microsoft will touch a huge % of the computing population and with that comes the opportunity (and responsibility for designers and developers building on the platform) to raise the bar on what makes for a good experience. I for one am glad that Microsoft has invested in WPF and the Expression tools so that designers can, for the first time, really participate in the creation of rich, compelling and usable Windows-based applications.

In the beginning we were referring to RIA as desktop-like experiences for the web because web-based applications typically offered a sub-standard form of interaction. Undoubtedly the use of AJAX and Flex have dramatically changed the experience on the web for the better; but equally, WPF has dramatically changed the experience that can be delivered on the desktop.

With the future release of lightweight desktop runtimes some will say that web and desktop experiences are converging so as to replace the need for traditional desktop apps, but native desktop experiences will continue to evolve to fully exploit the underlying hardware that is available and will provide the greatest opportunity to innovate (whilst being careful to ensure that experiences are appropriate – i.e. not building a 3D user interface just because you can).

When choosing an RIA runtime environment, developers can make a choice which balances the deployment mechanism (browser, desktop), the richness of user experience, the breadth of underlying application framework, the design, development and testing tools available and the desired reach of the deployed application. This is something that is really resonating with the web and digital agencies that I’m speaking to at the moment.

I’m a bit confused about the renaming of the RIA term, for two reasons:

1) I can’t help but think that this is a typical Microsoft move; take a term that was invented by someone else and then redefine it to make it Microsoft’s (I guess I don’t have to refer to other occasions where this happened). I might support the new message that Microsoft tries to introduce, but it should be a little bit more original to improve it’s Experience?

btw: How’s Ovums definition of a Rich Interactive Application really different to how we described Rich Internet Applications? And I suggest they add a flavor of ‘communication’ to it as well

2) It might be due to English not being my native language, but to me it feels like ‘Rich’ and ‘Interactive’ are way too much of an overlap.

OK, enough negative comments so let’s thow in some positive stuff as well (don’t like starting a fight here ).

What indeed is new since 2007 is that this Richness / Experience also affects the desktop more and more. And whilst obviously the report states that this is due to Vista and Office 2007, it doesn’t do right to the Experience Ecomony in the IT industry in general (think Apple, think Google, think what AJAX and Flex developers have been doing so far). But yes, the more year 2007 comes to an end the more Vista and Office (hopefully – I haven’t experienced Vista myself yet) have contributed to awareness of good computing experiences.

I haven’t followed the discussions on Ryans blog. To me, keeping ‘Internet’ in RIA really indicates that internet is coming to the desktop instead of the ’standalone’ internet fading away. And if the standard internet is going to be here for a while, the more a single development model for both browser-deployed applications as well as desktop-deployed applications becomes necessary (instead of one development model for the desktop, and another one for deploying through a browser). Removing the term Internet might indicate that the browser becomes obsolete, which I personally don’t see happening in the years to come. Especially since there’s still many enterprises around that don’t allow people to install something on their desktop, whilst you’d still like to make the experience as close as possible to the real desktop app (or when you are in the airport logging in with another pc, etc).

Now I think of it, this desktop-experience discussion is quite funny. In the beginning of the RIA times we were referring to desktop-like Experiences for web applications. Apparently those web applications have already come to a stage where desktop applications feel the Richness / Experience pressure coming from the web? Why would we otherwise have to replace the word ‘Internet’ in the RIA term? (pun intended ;o) )