Originally posted: Monday, January 07, 2008

Last year Microsoft got very ambitious and unveiled their Silverlight framework initiative Silverlight.Net. Silverlight is built on .Net 3.0 and is basically positioned as a direct competitor to Adobe Flash and the former Macromedia toolset. Microsoft provided a number of alpha/beta version of a broad toolset including an evolution of the Windows Media platform, as well as a good sprinkling of samples, training videos, some live events, a streaming CDN platform that “wasn’t competing with other CDNs,” the social website PopFly.com, etc.

Here’s the Silverlight Showcase: http://silverlight.net/Showcase/

This was more than some tools – this was an attempt to catalyze a state change in how sites are architected and position MS as THE dominant overall development platform.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I was pretty impressed with some of the tools, and some of the early adopter sites and examples were, well, they were cool. Also, the whole “vision thing” was quite ambitious, but this was a tall order. I wondered how serious MS really was – would they stick with it for as long as it would take to gain at least a respectable marketshare? Not surprisingly, so far, Microsoft seems to be pounding its head against the wall of established toolset inertia.

Well, it appears that MS is upping the ante. By some accounts MS is the # 8 site on the net, so there is certainly a whole lotta traffic there. Well, it seems that MS is embarking on a ‘project’ to replace the entire Microsoft site with one built on Silverlight. Can you say JOB SECURITY for some folks at Microsoft?

Of course, MS will start with some key portions of their site and I’m sure they reserve the right to change their minds, but here is the beta:

http://www.microsoft.com/beta/downloads/About.aspx

Bottom line? Microsoft has the deep pockets to stick with something like this if they really want to. The big question to me is just how serious are they? Will this be a 4-5 year experiment or will they stick with it for the long haul? Will they make the tools cheap enough for indy consultants to afford or will they aim this at the corporate market exclusively?

Personally, I’d like to see a better packaging of tools, more clearly delineating desktop from Internet development and a totally free Internet developer’s kit with some version of ALL the tools for cheap or even better, for free. Offer add-ons and nice templates for $, but if they want to get more developers out there building site with the tools, I think they need a better packaging of it than they have now.

Regardless, it seems like Silverlight is going to be around for “a while” – it will be interesting to see what happens.