*shrug* Flash is amazingly small (just a few Mb) and includes a VM and HD codecs. AIR is also extremely lightweight (Flash 9 + WebKit + SQLLite). Adobe have learned some new things during their gobbling up of Macromedia.

I'd disagree with Adobe products being "cruddy". PhotoShop is still the best image editing suite on the market, and pretty much bug free. Nothing compares to Illustrator as far as flexibility goes.

The only problem I have with Adobe products is the terrible install process on Windows... but then that serves you right for using Windows (installs perfectly smoothly on Macs).

While I'm not convinced with AIR yet, I think it's a great product. I'm just not sure people will bother downloading AIR apps (yet another runtime? no thanks). But anything that seamlessly bridges the desktop to the Internet is going to be exciting stuff (not least for people worried over security...?).

I prefer this route anyway - I don't want to see Adobe stuffing this kind of technology inside the Flash player; it needs to be kept small and fast, and so far they are keeping to this.