The advantage, here, is you push much of the computing to the desktop which can ease scalability issues on the server. You can also, potentially, provide a richer, more interactive experience for the user. The particular app I saw demoed that started me thinking about this was one from NASDAQ that permitted users to download a set of historical market data and do charting and graphing using an AIR app. When the user saw a particular data point of interest, they could zoom in seeing finer and finer-grained charting showing as much detail as they wanted to see — down to fractions of a second of trading activity.

There are apparently a number of other companies building analytical applications with AIR — including a rich client for accessing Google Analytics. These RIA technologies are really blurring the distinction between desktop and server. There are bringing back the sort of rich, highly interactive interfaces of desktop GUI applications while still leveraging a network-centric web infrastructure.

I can think of many applications I’ve worked on in the past that could have benefited from this technology.