Until about a year ago I would have considered myself more of a traditional C++ Windows developer (although I’ve been fooling with web stuff for years). Last year I had the privilege of going to Adobe’s developer conference (Max) and was amazed at how their technologies have progressed. Adobe targets Flash toward designers and Flex towards developers. If you’ve ever used any of the MS Visual Studio products, Flexbuilder is an easy jump. Also, Adobe is working on a product code-named “Thermo” that is supposed to fill the gap between designers and developers.

I agree that AIR is a desktop framework. Another important note is that AIR is really a virtual machine (like Flash Player) that allows a developer to access desktop services (embedded database, access to the HD, on/offline connectivity, etc). These are services that are not appropriate for a browser to use due to security concerns (anyone remember ActiveX). At Lectronimo, we used AIR to build a kiosk application that was very visual and contained a database to collect info for our client. We could have done this with other tools, but they would have been much more painful to get the same result.

As for Microsoft, I don’t think you can ever ignore the 800lb gorilla. I really think Adobe has a jump on the technology, but MS has an incredible developer base that will go where they lead it.