Where are you Apple?

Steve Borsch asks the question, is Apple in the same game as Adobe and Microsoft? As Adobe and Microsoft both move into higher end Rich Internet Applications (Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation) as well as move into each others territory by expanding the reach of the rich internet, why doesn't Apple seem to be playing in the sandbox?

I had a couple of posts about this, but nothing really seems to have changed. As Steve notes, Apple has a pretty wide base of Quicktime installs, at 100 million iPods sold, his conservative estimate of 50 million installs of Quicktime seems reasonable. The rest of Steve's technical analysis of Quicktime is pretty good and really does raise the question of why Apple isn't looking to turn it into a full-fledged RIA platform.

Apple has great talent, both from a user interface standpoint and a design standpoint. They really would be the perfect "Rich Internet Application" company. Core Animation, coming in Mac OS X Leopard, may be the first shot, and if it does well on the Mac, they may look at bringing a subset of it to other platforms via Quicktime. This could look a lot like the WPF/Silverlight model where the "premium experience" is only available on the native operating system, but a sister technology can be used cross platform. Xcode seems like a decent tool for building applications, but I haven't ever used it, so I'm not sure the developer story is fully there.

What do you think? Does Apple have anything to gain by entering the RIA world? Could they compete with Adobe and Microsoft? Is Core Animation a good start?