Silverlight and Content War

The news from MIX keep coming, and it’s looking very interesting. Scoble says “Microsoft rebooted the Web”.

On one hand, until a few weeks ago I was sure Silverlight was another attempt by Microsoft to take over another turf, with not too promising odds. Going after Adobe seems futile.

But now, Silverlight starts to look like a platform. For me, a platform starts with a set of good tools working together to build on it. With the Expressions tools, VS for building and debugging, the DLR and now the ability to run everywhere and anything (Read: Windows 2000 and up, Mac, but Linux is still missing) the odds are looking good. One question I have is how affordable the tools will be for amateurs, as this will make the penetration easier.

So the tools are there, the demos look great and the marketing machine starts rolling. The small runtime raises the odds of adaption. My bet is Microsoft is going to win it – not at first, but slowly and gradually up to a tipping point. The open source crowd (and anti MS zealots) will go with Flex, but the big business will go with the easy to roll out.

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