That made me lol….a lot. I’ve worked for bloomberg, at&t, time warner, mckesson, and a number of fortune 100 companies. Flex/Flash is the defacto.

Even google’s approach is Flex/Flash. Im glad Microsoft is getting involved as competition helps us all.

However, I now agree with your comment and many other ones on this post that Microsoft also wanted to evolve their .Net/Win32/… platform to be more Browser centric and Silverlight was the right vehicle for it.

So, I think that Silverlight has two driving forces. First is to evolved Microsoft .Net platform to the Web (this is your point), and second, it is to try to capture the Web developers to build rich Web application (i.e. Web Office type) with Microsoft technology rather than Open Web or Adobe Flash.

In this article, I covered only the second one.

I was working at Netscape at the time Microsoft crushed us. While some blamed it on Microsoft’s monopoly, I always thought it was because Microsoft played the Netscape game better than Netscape, by providing the most robust and standard compliant browser of its time (IE 5.0).

Unfortunately, nowadays, Microsoft seems to do the strict minimum as far of browser/standard implementation, which definitely play in Adobe’s favor. Why going Silverlight when Flash is so ubiquitous and rich.

BTW, I am a big fan of Adobe’s tools. I think that Photoshop is one of the best software application to date, and I definitely like the new Flash CS4 and Adobe Premiere CS4. This is why, at the end, I still think that designers are better off sticking with Adobe’s products.

I think Silverlight did help Flash, just as the iPhone later did, by raising the expectations of audiences in general, getting the whole industry on-board with that old “experience matters” goal.

I’m not sure on that “Adobe should commission Microsoft Marketing” though, that kind of decision is above my pay level…. ;-)

(And Dreamweaver is explicitly focused on the HTML/JS/CSS delivery channel… Adobe’s about publishing, in general.)

Here’s some more on “How Silverlight may have helped Flash”:
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2006/03/the_big_winner.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2006/03/mix_rough_notes.html
http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/06/adobe_on_html5.html

jd/adobe

Javascript frameworks have made DOM scripting child-play and learning those 3 things of CSS that would make styling much less painless than doing it the WPF way takes 5 minutes.

Also Visual Studio is not a very good markup editor and it’s painfully slow compared to any other editor out there.

To all the others that are afraid of WPF/Silverlight, just take a week to try it out in some non-trivial scenario, then come back to post their impressions in these comments.

So, I guess there are two ways to look at Silverlight. The Windows way (not covered in this article) and the Web ways.

For a Windows/.Net programmers point of view, Silverlight/XAML is be seen a just an evolution of the Windows programming model. And in this picture, there is no much Flash, since Flash was never there at the first place.

Now, from a Web developer point of view, Flash and Open Web are the incumbents, and Microsoft is the new comer and has to make room for itself. So, it has to compete against these two entities.

Now, the question is “Is Silverlight’s cross platform support a lure, as IE on Solaris was, or a serious cross platform commitment from Microsoft.” If the later, then, Microsoft is gearing head to head against Flash and Open Web.

Thanks Jeff and JC for your constructive feedback.