Excerpt from an Article I found it interesting, so might others.

[CDHBookingEdge]

Here's the excerpt:

Judith: What's the biggest obstacle for the spread of Flex? What do you see as an obstacle or a challenge that Adobe has to overcome?
Dave: The history and baggage that people think that Flash is for banner ads, and that you don't write real applications in Flash. That the player can't handle large data and it was designed for banner ads. I think that blocker is people seeing real apps. That's a lot of what we wanted to do today - to show real businesses running real, large applications. Take Over-C, the application we showed here today. The integration points are incredible: Service-based architecture, talking to Nokia devices, SMS, IVR, enterprise message bus, Java/J2EE, strict security... It's a serious enterprise class application built on what's effectively a Flash player.
That was [what] we demoed -- the SecurityGuard application.



Here's the full article:An Interview with Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems (http://www.fusionauthority.com/Community/4644-An-Interview-with-Dave-Wolf-of-Cynergy-Systems.htm)

[dr_zeus]

You can see parallels with AJAX. It didn't become big until cool applications like GMail were released. If we start to see super cool public apps (especially from big companies), people will be more willing to give Flash a second chance.

[Assertnfailure]

If we start to see super cool public apps (especially from big companies), people will be more willing to give Flash a second chance.

second chance as in flash failed a first chance?

[dr_zeus]

For some people, yes.

For the most obvious example, see the sentiments of the average Slashdot commenter. Before AJAX hit it big, Javascript had the same sort of problems there. They felt it served very little purpose other than to add "useless" DHTML effects. Amusingly enough, the Microsoft-invented XmlHttpRequest that spawned AJAX turned things around.

[Assertnfailure]

Actually when Flash was first introduced, it pretty much was intended for useless DHTML type effects.
It probably wasn't until at least 5 when it started serving more practical purposes.

In the early days of the internet, people shared the same sentiments for stuff like html being used in design rather than simply displaying information.

[Tink]

i think when Josh says 'second chance' he means that a lot of people have looked down on Flash for years and would have never have thought about using it, even at Flash 5 for building solid applications, not that it failed at what it was originally conceaved for. Now with the release of the new AVM and Flex 2.0 a lot of large coporations are looking at Flash/Flex to provide the solutions they require (i.e. a second chance).

It was intended for vector animation when first introduced and did it well :)

[enigo_m]

The key to flex uptake has been getting java developers on side, its really not a huge jump now, because actionscript is now at what I would call a "professional" scripting language - (oo, strict typing, packages, standard IDE, good component sets) it can be taken seriously as front end solution to software development..

Although AS 2 made strong advances most developers scoffed at using the flash IDE (it's so fiddly) - and even the release of version 2 component structure in mx left a lot to be desired.

Flash never failed - it is an animation tool, and as such it did marvelously well at it, even though some would claim it was misused. Bah Humbug I say to that sentiment - give people a tool and some people will use it for good and some for evil ;)

The swf format is the real issue here and where it will take us in the future. HTML is not a good media for complicated applications, it is still a document format - even with CSS and Javascript. And really javascript has not been pushed futher than the actionscript 1 level. Until browsers can happily comply with standards and implement them in the same manner, javascript will be what it has been since the DHTML days - hacky, and a nightmare to debug.

[dr_zeus]

Javascript isn't the problem. Its the differing implementations across the browsers. When I tried to pick up JS, I figured it would be a piece of cake since I knew Actionscript well. I gave up in major frustration as I couldn't figure out how to do basic things in both IE and FF with the same code. That said, I've had some success playing with various open source JS libraries because the authors take care of all those ugly details.