You may or may not have noticed the recent buzz about Adobe releasing their first non-Beta version of their latest product Adobe Air. The interesting thing is that (in my opinion) Adobe doesn’t do a great job giving any business benefits that the new product brings to the table. And they use way too many buzzwords without any tangible application.

From the product home page:

Business Benefits
Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

Haven’t we heard this before in various forms? Many times? And they don’t seem to do a much better job on the next page with their expanded explanation.

Adobe Air seems to be a natural evolution of Flash. Flash has served to solve two primary problems with the web (each ultimately associated with cost):

1. The browser wars can make creating Rich Internet Applications very expensive. Basically because you have to test the application and possibly make adjustments/fixes for every browser type and version that you want to support. So, if you want to support IE6 and IE7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista, you need to test the entire application or website 4 times if you want to be sure everything works and looks perfect. This can be very expensive. Flash solved this problem by delivering content through a plug-in, that allowed all Flash applications to look and act the same, regardless of browser, without the need of extra work per browser.
2. The existing standards for HTML/CSS/Javascript make creating and maintaining applications that have the interactivity and experience that you see in today’s best Flash websites and applications very expensive. Flash solved this problem by providing creative and development resources that were previously unavailable.

However, the Flash product is currently tailored to work in a web browser, with all of the assumptions and limitations that would come with that delivery mechanism. One primary limitation is that it is very hard to store very much data on a computer, creating a need to stay connected to the Internet to retrieve and store data.

This is where Adobe Air fits in. It is positioned to solve this last problem, by leveraging the existing technology that solved the first two. The other benefits that Adobe Air is, positioned to carry are, in my opinion, overstated since they are already addressed by many other technologies.

Ironically, Summers Pittman presented a fantastic business case for a product like Adobe Air in a recent blog post (before the Adobe Air press release hit the web, so Adobe Air wasn’t mentioned in the post). In short, he presented a real life (and very common) situation where he finds himself away from Internet connectivity with the need to work with Google documents and spreadsheets. The problem with this is that you can’t currently make changes to and create new Google documents without an Internet connection. And this is the same problem with 99% of all web applications. This is the problem that Adobe Air is positioned to solve.

An example of a Google Docs application using Adobe Air would allow Summers to create new and edit existing Google documents locally on his computer, without an Internet connection. Then, the next time he connects to the Internet, the application will sync his local documents with his documents stored on Google servers. This would reduce any need Summers would have for any other document creation and editing tool that worked offline, like Microsoft Office.