Light in Silver, a New Flash

Microsoft announced the Beta v2 of SilverLight, the upcoming New media plug-in. The first impression on the tool was greatly negative as Flash has dominated the space for a decade now, Java Applets went down, Shockwave went down(the bigger brother), and Flash kept on rising, unbeatable.

Adobe Air vs. XAML & Vista, Flex vs. Visual Studio, and Flash vs. SilverLight, that’s what it is about.

While XAML was introduced by Microsoft, Adobe Air was introduced to shift Rich Internet Applications to Desktop, Visual Studio could not integrate seamlessly with Flash and since it’s non open source Adobe got its own DE; Flex. Now that Visual Studio could not integrate better with Flash although there was an Extension of the Remote Components made for ASPX, but still. So Silver Light was born, a new Multimedia plug-in that integrates with Visual Studio and allows developers to make applications using Visual Studio and Designers using Expression.

One thing though, it’s so obvious, Flash is every where, web multimedia means Flash, how long would take Microsoft to start competing?

If Microsoft was to bundle SilverLight with Vista or whatever the next OS is, this would do nothing but what it did to Flash V5 plug-in, world-wide spread and fast penetration. Would the user base of Windows users dominate the decision based on plug-in penetration then? Quiet simply yes.

But then, the other end of the story are the Content Providers. How fast would they adopt SilverLight development? But then again the user base of Microsoft Development Tools would boost that.

Check what others have said on the same, it’s interesting, check’em out here.

Tweet This Post

Related posts:

1. Stationed to mobilize, Adobe Flash goes all SMART
2. AJAX vs Flash, round 1, arena: Web2.0, fight!
3. AJAX vs Flash, round 2, arena: Web2.0, fight!
4. No more M$, it’s MS
5. Flash’s Flashback