I was trying to comment from the perspective of a client who is shopping around for a solution. One presumes that they are not married to a particular platform - Ajax or Flesh. If one platform does have a significant advantage in dev time and/or support time then it will have a great advantage.

It’s hard to tell which platform will gain the largest slice of the pie but from everything I see the demand for dynamic websites is so great that there aren’t enough developers in either camp to fill all the orders. There’s plenty out there for everyone to do.

Thinking out loud here… developers are also going to be swayed by what they think is cool. That could go either way–those who value a rich, multimedia experience might think Flesh is cooler but those who are into open standards might lean towards Ajax.

One development that’s helping to shield developers from the quirks of individual browsers is Ajax toolkits like dojo and scriptaculous (please don’t ask me to get the periods in that name right).

I’d agree with you that design houses using Flesh probably won’t move significantly towards Ajax, but that Ajax developers will add Flesh. As you say, video is the entry point for Flesh.

Thanks for commenting.

If the ACME company wants a RMA then they probably don’t know the difference between a socket and a vector shape. They take their idea to a few different design/development firms and say, “how much and when?”

I don’t do Ajax development so I can’t say how long it might take to develop in that environment but I find it hard to imagine that it’s going to be faster than developing with Flex/Flash (Flesh). And even if they can both be developed in the same time for the same cost then there is still the question of support. From an Ajax standpoint there is always the consideration that code will have to be tweaked when new browsers are released. That won’t happen with Flesh.

So I can’t see many design houses that are married to the Flesh approach deciding to add Ajax to their skill set but I can see the Ajax crew developing some Flesh skills. It will start with video and then spill over more and more into just developing as much as possible in Flesh.