Morning - You've got Middleware!

After suffering through the usual vagaries of Ocado deliveries, feeding three small children and then getting them to school and nursery I got to sit down at my desk this morning in peace and quiet for the 1st time in a few weeks.
And, now that I am officially a twitter-er (http://twitter.com/changebase), I decided to download, install and use Tweetdeck (a great tool to manage your Facebook and twitter accounts. Tweetdeck can be downloaded from here: http://www.tweetdeck.com/
I was (kinda) surprised to have to download Adobe's AIR, the new browser-ish based application runtime environment. For those who are new to Adobe AIR, it could be described as a "a cross-platform runtime environment. Simply put, a way for applications to be developed/coded and run on any operating system. The programming languages used to build an AIR application  are Flash, Flex, HTML and AJAX. These are all inherently web-based programming languages. But, using AIR, those languages can now be used to create a desktop application.
So, AIR is cool because you can now use web application technologies to create and deploy desktop based applications.  This is a little like .NET for non-Microsoft web-heads.
To read more about Adobe's AIR, look here at Adobe's FAQ: http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/air/developer+faq#DeveloperFAQ-IsAdobeAIRpartoftheOpenScreenProject%3F
Not only will Adobe AIR applications look different. They will install differently, as you can see by the installation engine and related dialog box in the following screen-shot.

I am really keen to determine just how far the promise of "run on any operating system" will go.
I am sure that you could get good, similar results running across XP, Vista and the soon to be released Windows 7. But how will your application look across Linux, Apple's Leopard and Windows 7? Ohhh, and what about my iPhone and the soon to be released Windows 7 mobile.
If Adobe AIR get's this "run anywhere" play right - we could see a big change in how applications are developed, deployed and maintained in the future.