WPF/E Becomes 'Silverlight:' Microsoft Takes on Flash Directly

Microsoft has obviously learned from the ActiveX experience, having discovered that Web developers aren't willing to invest their time in completely replacing their online assets for an incomplete technology, on the strength of a powerful brand and promises alone. Any migration a Web publisher makes from HTML/Flash to XAML/Silverlight must be gradual, incremental, staged.

Moreover, the manufacturer must address the Web developer whose skills were honed in graphic design, not programming. In prior years, Microsoft's strategy was to move all developers to Visual Studio, as if graphic arts was merely a surface veneer, beneath which the artists' inner mathematicians were just waiting to burst forth. The fact that the two skill sets are not shared among a single group of developers, is no longer something that's lost on Microsoft.

As Brian Goldfarb explained, "Today, the typical workflow for designers and developers working together is, the designer works in Photoshop, marks up a comp, throws it over the walls to the developer, who then implements that, shows it to the designer, and they go, 'Wait a second, that's not at all what I envisioned!' There's this sort of 'Lost in Translation Syndrome' that's going on."

The hope now is that both sets of tools - Expression and Visual Studio - can complement one another at one level, and interface at another.

"The designers are working in Expression Studio using the visual metaphors and interactive design elements that they're used to; the developers are working in Visual Studio using XAML directly and using code, but they're all working and collaborating on the same project," he remarked. "So no longer do they have a lost-in-translation issue; we do have a round-tripping story that eliminates some of these discrepancies and what happens in the modern process today.

"We don't want people to have to rip-and-replace. They can take their existing skills in HTML and JavaScript. They can take their existing skills with XAML, and bring all of those to bear on building these new media experiences and RIAs on the Web using Silverlight, and using common tools," outlined Goldfarb.

Joining Microsoft this week at NAB will be three big-league partners - literally. Major League Baseball will be previewing a Silverlight application that presents a baseball fan with a dream environment for projecting statistics and video, in a rich, bubbling, liquid plasma of sports content. IPTV technology developer Brightcove will be showing off new rich media applications, presumably for both computers and set-top boxes, using Silverlight for both.

But perhaps most foretelling of the future of Silverlight on customers' systems will be a demonstration by advertising media developer Eyeblaster. Brian Goldfarb gave us some insight: "Today when you look at video ads, there's the standard pre-roll, 15-second clip, your one-minute CNN video, and then your 15-second post-roll clip. That's become the boring way of delivering advertising and video. Silverlight as a technology expands the capabilities of what you can do there, and that's why EyeBlaster is so interested, because they're looking at ways they can create contextualized advertising, embedded advertising, things that don't break apart the experience.

"So think about this: You're watching your favorite TV show on NBC, and up pops the little sparkly graphic at the bottom that says, 'Heroes,' and then advertises the next episode that's up for seven seconds, it's overlaid on top of your existing content, and it's completely seamless, and not really that intrusive," Goldfarb continued. "Silverlight has that capability for the Web, in changing the way that advertising and online video is integrated together. I think that is a super-compelling part of the story."

Watching the relative performance of Silverlight in the ever-changing Web development market will be intriguing for a variety of reasons. Perhaps not since Money first went up against Quicken has Microsoft entered an established market as a challenger. But more importantly, Microsoft has an opportunity here to establish itself as part of the fabric of the Web without either the intent or the appearance of consuming the Web in one colossal gulp.

Flash isn't going away anytime soon, and however efficient or elegant Silverlight may turn out to be, it won't be perceived as the solution rescuing customers from a Flash-based debacle. Even if Silverlight succeeds, unless Adobe somehow collapses, it won't capture a typically Microsoft-sized, 95% market share.

Silverlight is the blue, fuzzy, nebulous story of Microsoft as a genuine competitor. It will be interesting to see how comfortable the company will be in this role.