Today, Adobe has announced three software releases: Flash Builder 4, ColdFusion Builder, and Social service. That's right, after about two years of development Adobe has finally released Flash Builder 4 (a successor of Flex Builder 3). Why it took Adobe so long to release it? An expected answer is, "This was a complete re-thinking of the designer-developer workflow plus a complete re-design of Flex components". My guess is different: lack of proper investments into this project by Adobe management. I don't have any internal information that could prove this statement. It just my gut feeling backed up by my observations of the development this and some other similar products. I've seen the same dragging development of JavaFX by Sun Microsystems. Microsoft, on the contrary, releases new versions of Silverlight every 9 months or so. I don't think Microsoft has smarter software engineers - they just put the money where their mouth is.

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