Peerglobe Technology Inc.

Adobe describes AIR as a runtime that lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating system.

Developers can use AIR to build rich cross-platform desktop applications. In addition it has powerful and easy to use web communication support libraries, so that applications can easily interact with the back-end web servers. And I think that’s the key part of the AIR technology. It is meant to be used as an extension of our today’s web not a replacement.

Consider this example

I love Google Apps. And regardless it high popularity, I don’t think Microsoft Office can offer what Google Apps offer:

1. It’s free to use
2. The documents are stored online so it’s accessible anywhere
3. The documents can be shared among others using only emails.
4. It has very powerful collaboration feature that allows for many to work on a single document at once.

The only issue is the lack of richness of the document’s format compared to its desktop rival and that’s because of styling restrictions posed by HTML and CSS. But now Google can offer the same level of user interaction or even more by extending their office suit to desktops using adobe AIR. Not only it would cost Google a fraction of what it’s cost Microsoft to build a rich office suite (AIR allows for the existing web technologies to be used to develop multi-platforms desktop applications), but it can still maintain the 4 important advantages Google has against Microsoft office product.

This example merely shows the power of extending the web to desktop.