I was just on the Microsoft homepage and noticed a news item saying Silverlight is available for download. Out of curiosity I went for a look around to see what was on the mini-site. In case you didn’t know, Silverlight is Microsofts attemp to get some of Macromedia’s Adobe’s Flash market.
The reason they are going after this area of the software marketplace now is mainly due to the so-called Web 2.0. Major websites such as YouTube, Myspace and a whole host of other major sites are using Flash for their content and that has to annoy Microsoft.
The only problem is that the reason these sites use Flash is because everyone has it, around 98% of people on the internet. Microsoft will have to start from scratch with, erm… 0%. It’s going to be months or maybe a year or so before enough people have the plugin installed so that developers will even consider using it to develop content for their sites.
In my opinion Microsoft has got it wrong again, as they usually do when it comes to the internet. Nobody needs or wants another Rich Internet Application plugin and although I’m sure there’ll be extra functionality for IE users and APIs for .NET and IIS, we already have all this technology in one form or another. There really is no need for this – the internet should be built upon open, cross platform standards, not more propriatry software…. like eBooks maybe.
My bet is that Microsoft will do everything they can to use their Windows monopoly to get as many copies of the plugin out there and then try and use that user-base to pull people into becoming paying customers of various bits of software.
I'm a web developer based in the East Midlands, UK and if I keep up the current rate, I might have developed 3 million sites by the time I retire