I started interviewing at Adobe back in the summer of 2006. I wasn’t really looking for a job. I was gainfully employed consulting for some really awesome startups and was having a lot of fun. But I was persuaded to come in and talk with Kevin Lynch, and he told me about this project they were working on called Apollo.

If you have worked in technology your whole life, you realize that if you’re lucky you might get the opportunity to be at the ground floor of a technical breakthrough that will change everything, again. Five minutes into my conversation with Kevin, I knew Apollo had the potential to be one of those breakthrough technologies that would change the way people work and play with the web. And I knew that I had to be a part of it.

Eighteen months later, we’re launching AIR 1.0 with a fantastic set of customers on board, a robust runtime and phenomenal potential. I have never been so excited about a product (and I worked at SGI when it was fun). The ability of AIR to work with Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax and create web apps with desktop power gives developers a ton of options. All along we had said that the cool thing about creating an innovative runtime is that we didn’t know exactly what developers would do with it…and they have lived up to our expectations. We’re seeing big partners like AOL, NASDAQ, the New York Times, eBay, salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and Nickelodeon making some amazing applications that really push the limits of the technology. We’re seeing startups like Pownce, Finetune, Acesis, Fabrik, and Konolive to name a few creating cutting edge applications that blur the line between the web and the desktop. We’re seeing big enterprise players adopting AIR for internal applications – from Business Objects to Sharp, they are using Flex to create web apps with incredible UI’s for visualizing large amounts of data, and putting them on AIR, giving them a lot of additional functionality. For me personally, having worked at Excite and AOL, the fact that both eBay and AOL were shipping their AIR applications on a beta runtime was a big testament to what we had achieved.

And the really cool thing is, there is a lot more just down the road a bit. We truly have just started.

In the big hubbub of the AIR launch, a lot of people have forgotten that the Flex 3 framework is being released to open source tomorrow, along with BlazeDS. I’m really excited about how the development community will enhance Flex. We’ve seen Flex just explode in the last year, and I fully expect to see that continue this year. The whole RIA marketing is growing really fast as more companies understand that usability drives revenue.

I love launching products. It’s sort of like having a baby (without the mess..but with the sleepless nights!) I’ve been lucky to have launched a number of cool things over the years. But AIR holds so much incredible promise for the future – it’s not just about increased revenue, or an update to an existing technology. The team truly has done something revolutionary that will drive major changes in how we all use the web, and the applications that we that we use every day. Congratulations to the AIR and Flex teams on an enormous accomplishment!