I am just wondering how companies make money by offering free RIA application development platforms.They invested lot of money & human resources to create & improve those platforms. Of course no commercial company does that for free, there will be some sort of strategy. But How Microsoft makes money out of silverlight? How Adobe makes money out of Flash?Is it by offering tools to develop applications? or is it by licensing any software technologies? or something else?
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307answers:
5
+1
A:
Microsoft sells Visual Studio 2010 and Adobe sells their suite of tools for a hefty fee.
Hamish Grubijan
2010-01-25 04:28:40
+10
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Microsoft sells quite a few copies of Visual Studio, and Adobe sells quite a few copies of CS4.
Beyond that, Silverlight helps keeps developers in the Microsoft ecosystem, and therefore helps them make more money off of products like Windows and Office. A similar synergy exists for Adobe with Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and ColdFusion.
Joel Coehoorn
2010-01-25 04:28:54
+2
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It's only free on a desktop system. Flash on a mobile or embedded device is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to license.
Scott Bilas
2010-01-25 04:30:27
+2
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If I understand the question properly there are a few way they generate income off these technologies that others create Rich Internet Applications on.
- MS and Adobe will make money off of the Tools used to create the proprietary file formats these technologies utilize.
- MS and Adobe will generate profit, income, money off Training (Materials and Classes) and Support for the tools.
- If there are extended Frameworks they may charge fees for those as well.
- Any third party that makes widgets, objects, frameworks and or extensions to the products can license their original code.
There are also other avenues that open with licensing.
Simon Omega
2010-01-25 04:38:27