Everything you know is wrong…
Filed Under (AIR, General, InfoQ.com, RIA, Technology) by jonr on June-18-2008

Stuart Stern, our fearless leader at Gorilla Logic, loves to share that “Everything you know is wrong” is not a value proposition. Usually highlighting mistakes he saw as an executive at Sun Microsystems – one example being the slightly delusional believe that everyone should be using Solaris on their desktop instead of Windows. Sun held onto this for years because Windows was insecure and clearly inferior to the Solaris platform. The problem for Sun was that people actually liked Windows no matter how much Sun told them they were wrong.

I think this sort of pitch is actually quite common, as technology vendors are trying to gain ground in highly competitive markets. A certain amount of comparing and contrasting is essential to help potential customers understand a vendors product and where it fits in the market, but sometimes it is just too much.

Last week, I did an interview with the folks at Curl (an RIA platform) for InfoQ.com. Following the comments on the post and reading more about their recent benchmarks, it seems that Curl has settled on a marketing strategy that boils down to telling people that everything about Flex is wrong and everything about Curl is great. This seems to be getting them some attention, but it misses the mark a bit for me. The industry as a whole can be mis-guided, but when it comes to Flex I don’t believe this is the case. Also, like most people I just don’t like being told that my firsthand experiences are not valid.

Honestly, Curl sounds like an excellent platform for building RIA’s. Although, I do have serious reservations about deployment with Curl, as virtually no one has the client-side runtime. One of the things I love about Flex is that deployment is greatly simplified, as most (all) users already have the runtime. I would encourage those building RIA’s for the corporate Intranet to evaluate Curl along with Flex – outside of that controlled environment I would stick with more widely adopted technologies.

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(2) Comments    Read More

Comments:
Richard Monson-Haefel on June 19th, 2008 at 11:42 am #

Jon,

I think you have done an excellent job of analyzing the situation. In order to get noticed Curl needed to come out of dark and make our strengths immediately apparent to everyone.

Admittedly we have been overzealous in differentiating our product from Flex. That’s something we are going to step back from. I wrote a blog post apologizing for this on my own blog which you can read here: http://theclevermonkey.blogspot.com/2008/06/fair-play-in-love-and-war.html

Curl engineers and community members are passionate about Curl, but we need to use that passion to add to the discussion rather than attack our competitors. We know that now and we will be changing our methods accordingly.

The truth is that there are many applications for which Flex is a better solution. As you mentioned one of the strengths of Flex is ease of deployment and the ubiquity of the Flash plug-in. That makes Flash great for mass-consumer applications.

Curl is really strong in terms of security and performance, but its most appropriate in the enterprise where high-performance applications are needed and where sys-admins can control the desktop of the end-users. That’s a smaller audience but its one we serve very well.

If you want ubiquity and beauty than Flex is an excellent choice. If you want raw performance and tight security than Curl is a good choice.

We want to work with the Flex community as well as the JavaFX, Ajax, and Silverlight communities so that Curl can complement their efforts and add value where appropriate.

All the best,

Richard Monson-Haefel
VP of Developer Relations
Curl, Inc.

jonr on June 19th, 2008 at 12:34 pm #

Richard,
I do appreciate your passion for bringing attention to the power of the Curl platform. It is an exciting time to be a software engineer, as platforms like Curl and Flex finally give us the tools for building things that “wow” both stakeholders and users. I think it is important that platforms like Curl come along (I know it has been there the whole time) to provide choices and push the bar in the RIA space. I am optimistic that we are only beginning to see what is possible on the client, and it is competition that will bring us platforms that we can only imagine right now. So, I am personally excited to see Curl and Flex coexist, and hopefully have them push each other to continually get better.
-Jon

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