It's interesting to look at technologies that have disrupted incumbents in the technology arena. One thing I have noticed is that a disrupter is designed from the ground up to address a new paradigm while incumbents tend to fail because they were designed for a different paradigm.
Take Microsoft Windows, which has dominated the desktop for more than 20 years. It was never intended to be used on the wild west of the Internet and as a result it has fallen prey to innumerable viruses, worms, and so on. Compare that to Mac OS X, which is built on a Unix variant that was designed from the ground up for wide-area networks like the Internet. You don’t hear about Mac exploits very often because the Mac operating system has made security a part of its primary focus since the beginning. The result, Mac OS X is gaining on the incumbent Windows platform and will likely eat away at its market share until Windows no longer dominates the desktop.
The same can be said for RIA technologies. Take a look at Flash, which was not designed as a RIA and was not focused on security issues from the start. Flash evolved from an animation player called Shockwave. Compare that to Curl, which was developed from Day 1, over 10 years ago, as a RIA solution that specifically addresses security issues associated with the Internet. While Flash has suffered from numerous exploits (see here and here) over the years, an exploit against the Curl platform has never been discovered1. While Flash is the market leader in mass consumer applications, Curl is the market leader in enterprise deployments (for years we’ve been used by many of the largest companies in the world).
The security issue is going to haunt Flash just as it has Windows and I expect that platforms like Curl, which were designed from the ground up to address security in the wild west of the Internet will gain market share and eventually usurp Flash as king of the RIA platforms.
