The geeks are going crazy over Silverlight, and I await rational explanations in English.  What I gather so far though is exciting … a capability that can extend applications from the web, and I predict connects to the desktop too. 

I think the elevator pitch here is that Silverlight is a .NET browser plug in which works in all platforms, including Windows and Mac browsers.  I assume it will work in Linux too, given Firefox works there.

My prediction is that this will be the future of Microsoft Office – an app that runs in the browser like Google Docs, but also works with the desktop.  I suspect I may have to take back my doubts about Ray Ozzie based on what we see here. 

Some quotes from Techcrunch …

Silverlight isn’t just animations in applets, far from it – it is a very serious development environment that takes desktop performance and flexibility and puts it on the web.

At this time the languages supported are C#, Javascript (ECMA 3.0), VB, Python and Ruby.

My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight.

Source: Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer

More to come when I better understand this.  Online Banking app developers should be studying this though.

Note to Microsoft:  think about the audience when you write stuff.  The people that you need to get excited are the business folks, so please write in plain English.  This note from April 16th went right under the radar, and we are only getting it now, May 1st.

Enabling our customers to have richer experiences on the web by announcing Microsoft Silverlight – a new, cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for building the next generation of Media Experiences and Rich Interactive Applications. Formerly known as “WPF/E,” at NAB we are announcing our new brand identity along with the incredible support from our partner ecosystem.

Source:  Somasegar