Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch - the weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies - was thanking his sponsors the other day, and here's what he said about Adobe: 



"Flash and Ajax are turning into the dominant technologies for building new web applications. There is some seriously cool new stuff coming in the near future from Adobe as well. Our favorite Flash application is still Gotuit. Listening to music videos right now on Gotuit in fact."



As the blogosphere continues to process the likely trajectory of Flex 2, it got me wondering: is this perhaps the beginning of Something Truly Gigantic?



When he founded TechCrunch  on June 11, 2005,  Arrington sagely vowed to profile not only  new companies but also "existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space." The wisdom of this policy is precisely this: almost uniquely among Web 2.0 "influencers," Arrington understands that the long-term players in the Web 2.0 space are as likely to come from within the ranks of Web 1.0 as they are from the new tsunami of start-ups being unleashed by "The AJAX Moment."



What Adobe is doing, as was clear from the success of "Real-World Flex" this week, is to leverage the one aspect of Web 2.0 that everyone seems to have forgotten - the need for a runtime capable of delivering the richness that rich-media applications crave. John Dowdell brought to everyone's attention this week, for example, that an April 2006 consumer audit by NPD/MediaMetrix has been buttressed by a separate June 2006 audit by Millward Brown  which shows that 86% of respondents could see SWF8 content within ten months.



No other company, or technology, on earth, has ever succeeded on this kind of scale or with this kind of speed. Flash Player 8 was released in late August 2005, and this audit was conducted in June 2006. It means that Flash Player 9, which went final in late June, can be expected to be installed on over 500 million Internet-connected desktops and mobile devices by this time next year, and on 700 million not so very long after that.



So Flex 2-based Rich internet applications, targeted as they are at the Flash Player, surely have a truly colossal role to play in what Dion Hinchcliffe so compellingly describes as "Enterprise Web 2.0."