Air, Flex and Silverlight are "back to the future" approaches for Rich Internet Applications that would have us believe that the future of the web lies in a proprietary animation engine (Flash) or an ancient and proprietary fat client architecture (Silverlight).
I couldn’t agree more: these solutions are not the solution. We’ll see how it all turns out, but like Christopher Keene, my religion goes to Ajax and an evolution of HTML to accommodate applications needs while still retaining the original openness that made the Web a success.