> The ROI white papers on mm.com don't sway you then? Real-world examples > of increased revenue, increased customer satisfaction etc?
I am going to say "No" in answer to that (obviously). But please, read on. All of this is just my opinion but may provide insight into the minds of people who aren't yet sold on RIA's in Flash. Firstly I say "No", because I am synical. Secondly, because Macromedia has a vested interest in promoting it's technologies (which is their right, of course, and something that would be expected of any company that wants to make money). My original reply to Scott's post agreed with his statement that Macromedia have been having a hard time selling the concept of Rich Internet Applications and Flash (as the platform solution for generating RIA's). And that is at the core of what I am saying. It is a MM technology and they have to sell it to get their own ROI. So, I don't expect to see any "negative" information about Flash on the MM site. I am a prime example of someone that wants to be sold on the concept of RIA's but hasn't been. In the examples I have seen, there is no "reference" point of what was in place beforehand (in terms of quality, usability, etc. except to say that it wasn't working) and no other benchmark to see what a well-written DHTML application could have accomplished instead of a Flash solution. And all of the solutions I have seen so far (ignoring animation/video because there are only limited instances where those tools increase functionality) could have also been done by a similar size team with a similar experience level in other technologies. There are a lot of "bad" developers out there. And those same "bad" developers would be just as bad at writing Flash applications as writing a Cold Fusion/DHTML based application. A good case in point is the FarCry CMS. This product is one of the best CMS products that I have looked at (and I have evaluated and used several of the very expensive ones in the past - including Allaire's/MM's Specta). When you get a good team of developers together that know their craft, and the implementation platform, well you can achieve the same level of savings and productivity that many of the case studies on Flash RIA's produce. We are currently re-designing the company's website - using FarCry in fact - and surveyed our 20,000 strong client base for their opinion of what they wanted on the site. And the overwhelming response was for us to deliver more information to them. They didn't care exactly how it was delivered (and in fact our most popular service at present is a Research Delivery that sends out bulk amounts of PDF documents via email - and the clients love the service). Flash wont add to that functionality in any way. We are using Flash on the new site - to replace our message ticker that was originally a Java plugin. We "could" use Flash to replace our portfolio management tools, or to give them stock quotes - and may even do so sometime in the future. But there is no evidence to indicate that it will increase our revenue through increased brokerage fees - and we dont charge our clients to use our website facilities. I have looked at the NYSE example. I think it is brilliant. But similarly, it wont generate any more revenue for us - but it will increase our development and maintenance costs through increased training requirements as well as support requirements in regard to our user base (because they are already known to be resitant to change of any kind). I don't apologise for being negative regarding RIA's because I think there needs to be an opponent's voice so that, in the long run, such technologies can find their right place in the market. I hope this add's to the understanding of where I am coming from. 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