Sorry Mike, I’m not sure if I just disagree or whether you’re being disingenuous but your post talks about how marvellous AIR is to develop with compared to Silverlight – you even criticse Silverlight for the codey-ness, so to say that you’re talking about the users just isn’t 100% true (again, if you did want to make the techy argument, I’d say that the AIR vs. Silverlight debate is manufactured and people should be comparing AIR to the Microsoft widget stuff).

I would ignore the artificial boundaries you’ve set up in the title and most of the post, and look at your last paragraph and the last bit of your comment above – the lightweight stuff *is* winning, because it’s delivering apps to users, but here I think there are too many players to draw any conclusions but it’s certain that AIR has a guaranteed set of mindshare given the existing number of customers they have across their product lines.

I’m sure there are a couple of lines to insert here about the unbelievably bad user interfaces of most AIR (and other ‘lightweight’ desktop framework) applications 😉