Silverlight!

Silverlight is the first product from Microsoft that serves as a technical apology to Bill Gates’ documented hatred of the Internet—this is, of course, based on you accepting this episode of NerdTV with Dave Winer as a document. In any case, Scott Guthrie is my replacement for Bill Gates (via Ray Ozzie, of course). “The Road Ahead” is toward Silverlight. Now the Silverlight bullets:

• Silverlight is not named after Amanda Silver.
• Silverlight runs code up to 1000 times faster than JavaScript code, according to Scott Guthrie—and, yes, Silverlight runs on a Mac.
• Silverlight ignores the Linux desktop—perhaps Novell/SUSE should chirp a little in its gilded cage? Where’s Miguel de Icaza on this one? Miguel says, “As a Linux/BSD user, this might pose another setback for our desktop.”
• Silverlight does recognize and promises to support the MP3 format. This surprises me. It is an almost unbelievable move away from typical Microsoft arrogance.
• Silverlight can save on bandwidth by streaming the exact content controlled by a powerful client.
• What’s very interesting is seeing how Microsoft eats its “dog food”—will all of the live.com properties move gradually or dramatically over to Silverlight? Will Yahoo! Video “support” Silverlight according to some “strategic partnership”? Will Microsoft proudly announce that it has removed all ActiveX controls from all of its products—even those moss-covered bridges made by the trolls on the Microsoft Project team?
• Silverlight applications are to be confused with WPF “XAML Browser Applications,” introduced in the “Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP” until further notice.
• Silverlight carries on the laudable Microsoft tradition of exposing a technology that was previously opaque to non-Microsoft professionals. That opaque technology was Windows Media Player. Silverlight can be seen as .NET Interop with Windows media player… The last time I personally remember someone seriously writing a JScript browser application for Windows Media Player was almost a decade ago at House of Blues Digital. Silverlight is supposed to make me care about this again.
• Adobe can’t beat Microsoft ever when it comes to building tools that build applications. These are strong words from a guy that is not so unquestioningly grateful for all-things Redmond. Adobe only has the upper hand in the visual designer department—so all Microsoft has to do is not fuck up trying to attract real visual designers into its fold. This seems so simple—but we must remember we are dealing with Microsoft here… Microsoft needs to find all of the Illustrator and Flash “thought leaders” and buy them off one by one… Then we will start seeing shows on iTunes featuring Silverlight design tutorials. My suggestion to Microsoft: start with lynda.com, she probably has all of the famous Adobe-pumping stars in her little, black PowerBook. Another ‘crazy’ suggestion is to add QuickTime support for Silverlight. Sometimes it’s just not technically possible to do things like this because of the old lipstick-on-a-pig adage. My ignorant guess is that it is more politics than spaghetti code. Apple has had plenty of time to build tools for its QuickTime interactive stack. They should just let Microsoft take this over for the near term and try to betray Microsoft later. Apple ‘betrayed’ Adobe in a similar manner with their Final Cut Pro stuff so they should be able to take out Microsoft as well. In the mean time, .NET developers can take advantage of the penetration into the Mac desktop.

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