To be fair, AIR was not the first in the domain. Mozilla had XUL/XULRunner ~15 years ago, which could be used to quickly develop kick-ass cross-platform applications in JS (and is still, by and large, the base of Thunderbird and Firefox).
Sun thought that they had something like that with Java Apps ~20 years ago, except they forgot to make installation and UX compelling, and the memory requirements were unacceptable for the time.
Sun thought that they had something like that with Java Apps ~20 years ago, except they forgot to make installation and UX compelling, and the memory requirements were unacceptable for the time.