Adobe Flex vs Silverlight, the Morgan Stanley case

With Morgan Stanley choosing Adobe Flex as technology for their trading platform (named Matrix), a debate around these two platforms fired up. Morgan Stanley’s choice is obviously a big win for Adobe as a step into the enterprise software world. Morgan Stanley’s Matrix founder and global director Hishaam Mufti-Bey sums up the two main arguments against Silverlight quite well:

Going out to clients and not installing software, that is a major show-stopper for Silverlight. If Silverlight turned around and offered that one day, that I didn’t need to install stuff on the client’s PC, then it would be a head-to-head. Flash is on 97.7% of the world’s browsers. That was a major consideration for us.

You have to look at the people that use that technology. The design community. That’s the biggest problem that Microsoft has. The designers all carry around Apple laptops, they all use the Photosuite [sic] set of software tools. It’s like asking structural engineers to stop using CAD applications. That’s the tool that they use, and if you can’t convince them to switch away from your software suite you are going to get a limited number of designers that will use Microsoft’s toolset … if you can’t get the designers to switch, to learn a new language, then how can you possibly ever get some traction?

The Matrix platform was one of the applications demonstrated at Adobe Max and with Tim Anderson’s summary post about the presentation, the debate goes on. Especially interesting to see Microsoft’s Silverlight Product Manager John Allwright being part of the discussion and trying to push the debate into productivity and cost. I bet we will see more of these arguments in the near future. Snip from John’s comments:

2 years, 30 developers ($10 million assuming $100/hour), 600k lines of code sounds like a huge investment not to mention the ongoing maintenance of such a large codebase. For most customers I speak to the low ROI and risk on this level of development effort would be prohibitive. In todays market I see a more common profile for RIA as be 2-3 devs, 1 designer and a maximum of 6 months to deliver.