Allison Randal’s blog - O’Reilly Radar - about how email doesn’t work, got me to thinking about how Adobe Apollo might influence the application market. Sure, there’s the cross platform capabilities and the ability to work with data both on and off line. But I think one of the aspects that might be getting overlooked is how it will help build an ecosystem of application development.

Currently to develop applications you need a host of programmers, system analysts, etc. It’s a lot to bit off and a big commitment. But with Apollo you can pretty much leverage you’re current employee assets. Any serious design firm has a few Actionscript coders around. You’re pretty much set. Well, these people are going to have to get up to speed on Actionscript 3 and the Apollo environment, when it comes out, but that’s what developers do. Just give them some time and space.

The upshot of all this is we are likely to see a bevy of new applications in the next few years developed with Apollo. Needless to say email applications will be one of the more popular Apollo apps. Maybe a few of them will come up with some improvements on the current crop standard email apps and we’ll see an evolution of those into a few apps that really hit a home run with features and usability.