Wanna be successful?  Penetrate.  Advertising, marketing, self-promotion, facebook applications, anything really, get your name out there in the public consciousness, eventually people will look to you first (as long as you don’t drop the ball and start to suck).  That’s why I admire most of the moves made by Adobe after the Macromedia acquisition.  Open-sourcing their products means getting their name and software out there, and (hopefully) saturating the market with their products.  On Ted Patrick’s post to whip people into a frenzy (totally successful, by the way) about the new software releases he stated “Remoting and messaging will never be the same!”, and I’d say it looks like that is going to be the case. Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but I don’t have a hard time picturing amf data transfer replacing vast amounts of xml-based data tranfser after a short while. I know I’d certainly rather use amf any day.