Silverlight Released

Microsoft released Silverlight on Sept. 4th. This "Flash-killer" from Microsoft has gotten a lot of press. Most of it has been focused on how it competes with Flash for the animation and graphical affects for which Flash is normally used on the web. In many ways I see this side of Silverlight being the least interesting and least chance of success for the tool. Flash owns this market and creative people gravitate to Adobe, not Microsoft, for creative tools. With every computer coming with Flash and Silverlight requiring and installation, I can't see Microsoft getting much traction for a long time to come.

I think this focus, however, misses the greatest potential of the technology, the .Net Framework that underlies the tool. While Adobe has tried hard to woo developers to its camp with increasingly advanced Flash development tools, they haven't had much traction. At the same time Microsoft has a huge percentage of the developer market with its .Net framework. Silverlight includes a major subset of the .Net framework, making Silverlight development an easy transition to .Net programmers. This along with the cross-browser/cross-platform nature of Silverlight (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari/Windows, Mac, and Linux) open the door to really powerful and sophisticated applications on the web. Everything from web based word processors and spreadsheets to sofficisticated airline booking systems and event registration systems could be built on such a framework with much more intuitive interfaces than are possible with even the latest AJAX tools.

There are still many challenges ahead for Silverlight including getting enough users to install it and the SEO and bookmarking issues that already affect Flash, but it holds some strong possibilities and is worth following.