The nice people from Adobe met me the other day at a not very secret London location, I can honestly say for the first time. I’ve reported Adobe stories in the past but to be honest it has always been one of those companies whose products I shy away from, because to go there is to enter serious geek developer country, with products like Flex, Apollo (now AIR) and so on.

So it was a relief that the firm’s Jeff Whatcott started talking to me in plain English – well, American, but it was near enough – about how AIR can reach the parts other developer tools just can’t. Now I can see that it allows programmers to deliver applications with the “richness of the desktop but the reach of the web”, but I just had to take Jeff’s word for it when he explained it makes it possible to blend HTML, Flex and PDFs in a way never before possible, as they’re all treated as equal components. Similarly, Ajax “runs out of gas” when used for serious enterprise applications, unlike good ol’ AIR, he told me.

There were harsh words too, maybe unsurprisingly, for Microsoft’s Silverlight technology which he didn’t give a huge chance of success beyond creating micro apps like small portlets, because of the lack of runtime ubiquity – yet another thing for programmers to learn. Virtually no-one has the Silverlight runtime yet, according to Whatcott, and to get developers interested you really need around 80 percent of the web covered, where of course, Adobe has a bit of a lead. On the Google Gears front, the message was, more agnostically, we’ll have to wait and see which tool becomes the most popular for doing things like allow users to work offline with their web-based apps. As always, best laid plans often run awry when you leave it in the hands of those freakishly devoted and talented bunch of developers.