After Microsoft has released Silverlight (Check out the basic info here: http://silverlight.net/ and some examples here.) and basically claimed itself as better at everything that Flash has been good at, I see it as the beginning of a hot war over the RIA tools.
So far, Silverlight, Flash/Flex/(maybe AIR), AJAX, and JAVAFX are in the war. Flash/Flex has been the hottest and the most popular, while Silverlight has been the latest and dead against Flash/Flex.
I see it as Adobe’s big move to give a free AS3 training day by Moock all around the globe. Big deal. Check it out here: http://www.moock.org/blog/archives/000255.html. BTW, all the guys in my office have signed up for it.
When Flash was first out and got hot (Flash 5 around 2001), there were a lot of designers coming from visual / graphic related background making timeline animations in Flash. However with time progressing, As2 has replaced AS1 and AS3 will finally replace AS2. Now I am coding in Flex with pure code and rarely have Flash open. Just like me, the people who are still working on Flash/Flex as their day job are probably the ones who are more logic and get a good hold of real programming (if not OOP yet). A good amount of people who were only doing timeline animation are not interested in converting themselves into a real developer. So Adobe realized along the way they have lost quite some designers as their potential users. I see this tour of free AS3 training day as a preventive move by Adobe to stop the over-the-edge users to become Silverlight embracers.
