Billy - I agree with you and I changed the post title.

Silverlight looks like great technology, but that is by no means a guarantee of success.

I don’t think it’s an either/or in regards to flash or silverlight. Each will have it’s place. Silverlight’s video may certainly overtake flash video, just like flash overtook Real and MS’s earlier streaming formats. However, there is a lot more to flash than video, and that stuff is still at least one generation ahead of what is in silverlight.

As far as the amazed, “ms just handed adobe their ass”, response? .. You were at MIX (a microsoft-run conference) for crying out loud. I’m sure the adobe fanboys will feeling the same way after the keynotes at Adobe MAX.

Considering to unsubscribe to TechCrunch. What happened to the blog posts I always looked forward to reading?

This sounds way to much as MS propaganda to me… where is the objectivity?

Also, since when is a 4MB download considered small? It might not be that much these days, but to say: “most impressed by how small Silverlight is (4 MB) “???

Am I the only one who thinks Scoble “left” Microsoft to mingle with the Web 2.0 crowd to gain their trust, and then slowly start spreading the MS propaganda? Muaaahahahahaaa

.Net is great but … Silver light …(browser started crashing)

@Scoble

oooh I didn’t get a free pass!!

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Big Web Weenie Roast

“everyone” — windows (plus now macintosh!! oo boy!! we rule the world!! look at the stats!!)

“download” — download?

“community” — Default.aspx?

“rebooted the web” — was that a virus that only works on windows because nothing happened here (at least it didn’t crash my browser)

“open source” — where?

Mike, FYI, I’ve just unsubscribed to your blog. This post showed
how poorly you seem to handle things like this. A shame, really.
It makes you wonder how much reality was behind your previous
posts.

Mats

This seems advertisement

I would be a little worried because I like the open choices we have today, but I am not because — how can they make something so good to “reboot” all the web if they couldn’t even make IE7 support XHTML and CSS standards at the level mozilla supported years ago.

Another question I had watching at presentation the other day as they mentioned high definition videos all the time…. “Is not the only problem with playing those in real time streaming the bandwidth and not the ability of player to play/display them?”

Otherwise all technology improvements are good and I salute them… it will only make the competition sharper and things progress more. I am sure Flash (and Java) wont stand looking but are allready thinking what to do.

I installed it to Firefox on my Mac. I tried a Silverlight demo — it promptly crashed my Firefox. I promptly uninstalled it. I’ll wait for it to mature a bit (or die out) before trying it again, thanks.

I applaud Michael for bringing the Techcrunch audiance’s attention to Silverlight, and having the confidence to give it a thumbs up - it would never be a popular spin on the announcement. It is an exciting technology. And can happily sit alongside Flash. Microsoft has put a lot of effort into the ecosystem of development tools, technologies and community. I’m hoping that some big design agencies start using Silverlight for some campaigns, then we should see some real creativity and adoption.

Some reasons why I think this is not the Flash killer

- It’s from Microsoft and that carries a lot of baggage with it. YouTube will not support, MySpace is questionable, Apple - ha. (In retrospect, MS should have offered 2 billion for YT.)
- Developers didn’t make Flash great. Designers did. I haven’t heard any designers rave about this.
- It’s not cheap. Designers either use ripped versions of Flash or bought a $99 version. Expression is $299.
- Where’s the Open Source? If it’s not open from OS integration to file format I’m against this.
- Bad Name. Sounds like a crappy movie or an indie band

Why isn’t TechCrunch allowed to report that Microsoft have actually done something good? Why is this considered ‘advertising’ or ‘drinking the kool-aid’?

If Google or (snigger) Apple had come out with a platform like this, you’d all be creaming yourselves over it.

Jeez.

@magnus

I believe that what MS is trying to do here is bring proper, decent, ‘rich’ (hate that word) web applications to the masses. Do you see Flash being used to develop 90+% of websites? Nope. Is Flash used to develop the intranet and extranet sites that power today’s businesses, no. For whatever reason, no.

Web applications today are an abomination. The browser is constantly pushed, twisted and forced into doing things it was never designed to do in order to make half-usable applications - hence the proliferation of CSS, XHTML, AJAX, Javascript, etc etc etc. The combination of which makes web applications a developers nightmare. I develop them for a living. And every time I have write yet another javascript hack to validate a form field, or to get some value to or from a textbox on a form, a little piece of me dies inside.

Web development today is just way harder than it should be, or needs to be. Compare it to developing Windows apps. I hope to god Silverlight changes all this, and developers can get back to developing and designing, rather than spending their days hacking CSS to make that textbox move two pixels to the right.

Reading this post and the comments I am surprised that no one has mentioned Microsoft Astoria (the other big announcement) and it’s similarity to Google’s GData.

If you are interested I have written a post on this subject http://www.vecosys.com/2007/05.....gle-gdata/
and how Astoria + Silverlight might challenge Google GData and Firefox XUL.

Other than that I am sure Silverlight will be part of IE8 or part of Windows download. So we will get it one way or another!

as an independent content creator i can assure you i will not use this technology or make use of a service that solely relies on this technology - no matter how good it might be.

microsoft never had my trust and i believe many indie media distributors (=web users) think the same. i feel sorry for the developers, but maybe it just was a mistake to work with/for microsoft.

flash already is kind of compromise for me and while i think competition is needed this one is now already highlighted on my personal “to boycott” list.

Silverlight is DOA. Its an MS Centric and MS only technology.

The Web is built by hackers running Mac OS X on their MacBooks…. or at worst, Linux.

Michael Arrington is great at giving his impressions of seeing someone’s website… but he is not someone to get your news about software from, or for developers to take technology direction from. (And frankly, I’ve seen a lot of non-engineers talk about how great some engineer is who likes whatever technology they are talking up to immediately assume that the engineer they are talking about doesn’t really like it, or is a junior guy. Sorry, if you’re not an engineer, you can’t add credibility to your argument by saying “this great engineer really likes it”)

There are a lot of lost souls stuck on microsoft technology, and they do get to have solid jobs doing “enterprise software”.

But the future of the web is not coming from the enterprise–nothing creative is.

The future of the web is coming from hackers, and hackers have already rejected microsoft.

This is just another in a long string of well coordinated MS PR events signifying nothing.

haters DIE!!!! MS is taking over!!!

Microsoft Silvershite is so crap is crashes my browsers tyrying to install, why launch a buggy as hell plug in that cant even run a 340×220 video, LOL, what a joke.

I second matt on the install crash. It even crashed my IE6.

Microsoft does indeed do some important things, but internet
has always eluded them. What they are good at is
“giving presentation”. Web 2.0 started a while ago, and
they are late to the party. Some improved video codecs would
be good, but I think those will come from the open source/academic
community.

I’m still waiting for someone to show me how this isn’t just an Adobe People vs Microsoft People thing. I think Silverlight is very impressive and it does have a very small footprint…but I still haven’t seen anything that makes me say “I *have* to use silverlight for my next app”. It looks very slick and pretty and it does look interesting. But I guess the point is that if you’re an adobe guy, you aren’t going to run out and switch to using microsoft development products anymore than Apollo is going to make a company switch from being to microsoft shop to being adobe oriented.

IE vs Firefox, Visual Studio vs Eclipse, Emacs vs Vi…there have always been different camps who will defend their chosen product with religious fervor for all types of development apps. The fact of the matter is that anything you can do with silverlight you could theoretically do with notepad. After that it just becomes a question of which features you like and which software/company you feel more of a personal connection and loyalty to. If your first job was microsoft, you’re probably going to stick to microsoft, etc.

I think the true measure of a development app is providing something that absolutely cannot be done with hand coding (and I’m not sure that’s possible).

I’ve been using Flash for several years, and Silverlight (WPF/e) for as long as it has been around. I am amazed at how people who obviously lack experience in using these tools feel justified in commenting on how one is better than the other, including Mr Arrington.

Silverlight doesn’t even come close to where Flash and Flex is up to, and I will of course justify this. But I don’t blame it, it’s only a 1.1 product. Nor is it as easy or rapid to develop in, and yes realistically you do need to use Visual Studio/Expression and of course Windows to develop in it. I tried using my existing Eclipse + ANT + Subversion workflow, it quite simply doesn’t play fair.

This next comment is not subjective… At present there is nothing offered by Silverlight that Flash doesn’t do equal or better (you can’t exactly count WMV because that’s just the sole supported video format, as is FLV for Flash). This includes alpha video, HD video, data loading, skinning or object oriented programming. Not to mention the install process has crashed most peoples computers that have tried so far, and 1.1 is not even backwards compatible with 1.0 content.

Unlike Flash/Flex it doesn’t do: sound processing, binary data exchange, sockets, per pixel bitmap editing, bitmap filters (convolution, color matrix etc), bitmap effects (drop shadow, blur, glow), frame based animation (i.e. hand made), webcam, microphone, text input, e4x, built in file upload/download, user controls, layout engine, local data storage, linux player, express install (through player), BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY for 10 years so far! finally 1.1meg footprint… these are just a few features.

So far it’s a valiant effort, but let’s not kid ourselves here. Sometimes the level of not-knowing-anything-outside-the-MSFT-world is jaw-dropping. The video posted in these comments is great, Metaliq are obscenely good at Silverlight/WPF and Flash/Flex, but you can gaurentee they have done much better work using the latter, have a look at their website if you don’t want to wander too far or prefer to be drip-fed.

First there was java on the web, and it failed…

Then came .net to the web, and it failed too…

Move along, next!

Once again missing the point about shunning linux and this time by the site’s owner.

I have doubts about TC’s objectivity

Time to delete this link.

Silverlight looks interesting, but I just can’t risk adopting a product from a company that has a rather bad track record when it comes to the web, as well as providing cross-platform products. Im pretty sure Im not the only one with that attitude and that’s really worries me about Silverlight’s future.

I expect Silverlight to become a great tool for people already locked into the Microsoft eco-system. I wish them well and expect some pretty cool things, but Im not going to follow their lead anytime soon that’s for sure.

Last time we trusted the web to M$ we had to wait 10 years to untangle the mess those SOBs did.

This time we say

FUCK YOU M$!!!

LEAVE THE WEB ALONE!!!

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy.” Man, you must be living out of reality or somewhere in the future to predict such things. We are talking about ubiquity of 98% computers running flash plugin with rocket science internal structure and very successful marketing strategy…
Hopefully Silverlight will help to make web better and competition is always good, but still I suggest not to make such a big deal about something completely new.
BR Milan

i just got this trying to install into ie 7

Error 3010

Installation has completed successfully. However, a restart is required to complete the install. Please save your work and restart your computer to finish installation.

Stick your toy where the sun dont shine asswipe

I wish i could post a screen shot

You people realize that flash has only recently released a version for Linux? Why does everyone bash MS for a BETA product that doesn’t support Linux while at the same time supporting Adobe and Flash which “was not cross platform” for the majority of its existence?

You also have to ask yourself, what is flash used for? Games and video mostly. Silverlight will be great for both - especially video (high definition, full screen viewing). Is it a flash killer? Probably not, but it will be a great alternative for many developers. Competition isn’t a bad thing. If you don’t trust MS, don’t use the product (as a user or as a developer) but as far as I’m concerned, I can’t wait for high def streaming video in the browser (Div-X has a plug in to do this as well- no one has mentioned that)

Competition is good, but MSFT has their work cut out for them—no Mac/Linux developer tools? WTF? Who the hell wants to run Parallels to run Expression? Not me. I’d much rather run Eclipse or Flash natively thank you. Maybe next time you ride the MSFT pony, you can ask them to respond to Paul Graham’s quote, “Microsoft’s biggest weakness is that they still don’t realize how much they suck.”

Scott, you’re wish is already out there Here is HD streaming, full-screen, in the browser (using Flash):

http://www.flashvideofactory.c.....en123.html

(you right click to go fullscreen in this one)

@scott: I agree with you, mostly. But I can’t get rid of feeling that MS was somehow forced into RIA story and that Silverlight was produced too quickly. Maybe I’m wrong about this…
After all, Flex is added to platform with 10 years of backward compatibility of Flash player and that’s for taking hat off (I’m taking hat off also to many MS products…)
My suggestion is to make products more compatible, which is much better :), especially if it is true that those products will compete on the OSS market.
BR, Milan

Cross-browser, eh? Easy install?

Then why does the Whitepaper, “Getting Started with Silverlight”, show the install BREAKING in Mozilla Firefox?

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-.....-e_topic14

Admire, in all its glory, the XAML as rendered within Mozilla Firefox, as shown in Figure 20. “No suitable plugins were found.”, it seems.

Remember when ActiveX was launched as a cross platform alternative to Java? Remember how much faster it was? How slick the demos were?

Remember when Microsoft killed ActiveX on the Mac and told everyone to switch to Windows?

Somehow I don’t see too many people choosing to drink from Microsoft’s poison chalice this time.

It’s interesting to see the Silverlight size of @ 4MB being touted so much. According to the link below, the download size of Flash 9 is 1.1MB.

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave.....omoid=BIOW

Did the pro Silverlight camp not realize what the competition had?

dont things take 5 years to be adopted by the general public? - so shouldn’t I wait until it comes out

Guess TechCrunch is now completely in Microsoft’s pocket - good job. From now on I’ll get my tech news from less biased sources.

yeah, Michael your lame you sell out and Microsoft sucks. I’m out.

I’m late to this discussion.

- Silverlight and PHP/RoR/etc

Silverlight doesn’t need MSFT stuff running on the server (it’s a client side technology). You can happily embed it in your PHP page running on Apache in a BSD box and all of Silverlight will work just the same.

- Silverlight on Linux

I strongly recommend that folks watch the Scott Guthrie video on Channel 9. Like a few of the commenters pointed out, this is a beta of a v1 release. Personally, I’m amazed that for a v1 product, it supports Safari, Firefox on Mac (both PPC and Intel) and Windows. In my book (and this isn’t me being a shill), that’s some darn good work from the Silverlight team

I seriously doubt the current generation of leading webdevelopers an designers are going to embrace a Windows-only closed development platform, given the fact that especially the innovative non-corporate part of this industry is dominated by open source enthousiast an Apple lovers.

Especially given the way these two groups have embraced each other in the past 5 years, the best webshops these days are a no-Microsoft zone.

What you are very likely to see is sites using Silverlight for videoplayers (unless Adobe strikes back) where they would previously prefer Flash over embedded Windows Media.

But maybe this is just wishful thinking. As much as I dislike Flash for not being part of the “open” web, if Silverlight wins the Web is dead, and we are back to Bill Gates original ‘95 wet dream of the Microsoft Network.

Silverlight is “important” in the way that it gives of one clear signal from Redmond: despite all the sweettalk, this company hasn’t changed since the days before the anti-trust cases. The people that build Silverlight must really dislike the internet.

I think you drank to much MS KoolAid when you had that big long sit down with them.

* Does Silverlight get my app in front of more users (more reach)?
Nope - writing to the Flash run time runs on more computers than Silverlight, which only runs on new versions of Windows and Macs.
* Does Silverlight allow my app to do more, or be smaller, or be faster (more rich)?
Again, nope, Silverlight lacks many controls and other features of the more mature Flex. The download is bigger, and unlikely to be faster in execution as both run native code.
* What are the business ramifications of aligning with Microsoft’s platform?
Disaster, high cost and lock in. Hardly needs saying.
* What is the growth path for Silverlight?
I assume it’ll play catch-up to Flex/Apollo, adding more and more features in a race to catch and distract from Adobe. It’s a long time since Microsoft did anything truly insightful or inventive.

@18

“Silverlight is not going to be a hacker’s wet dream”. Speaking from the viewpoint of a professional penetration tester; I can not think of a single MS technology that hasn’t been a hacker’s wet dream. I love when I get to test a MS technology based application or web site, because I know instantly It’s going to be a quick and easy job.

Btw, I said wet dream, and penetration in the same post. That’s just great.

There are about ten thousand things that Microsoft needs to get right to make Silverlight stick. “Dazzling engineering” is just one of them.

hi,

“It makes Flash/Flex look like an absolute toy” … that really makes me laugh, seriously everyone here knows that Microsoft ships ALL of its products with bugs and security issues that look already “old” when they hit the market so i doubt they ‘ll do better with this new thing. Ok, they’ve done good work here, but you can’t compare that to Adobe’s products, it’s so ridiculous

1. install Silverlight beta plug-in on OS X.
2. go to an official MS Silverlight demo site.
3. dismiss the dozen or so error messages coughed up by the plug-in.
4. remove plug-in and trash installer.
5. go on living without this trash.

yes it is beta but you would think that MS would want to make sure that their demo content actually worked.

Looks a promising technology though it has a long way to go to catch up with flash.

Looks quite exciting will be interesting to see how it is cross platform.

Sad. This really hits the low water mark on Techcrunch. Mike, could you please explain how on earth you figure that SilverLight makes Flash/Flex look like a toy?

This post was a joke right? i hope it is otherwise it truley speaks volumes of the depth of knowledge and involvement you have in the community.

I think the most basic rudimentary way to answer this, is simply put, does the thing even work. Ive tried countless times on numerous computers to run the demos for silverlight but on firefox i don’t even get prompted for a download, and on IE the plugin fails everytime.
The installer says “Microsoft Silverlight could not be installed on your computer” with this “more information” message.

So to use this “Browser” Plugin i have to stop whatever im doing, shut down and restart and then use it… not very discrete and effectively for content on demand, this fails miserably.

Error 3010

Installation has completed successfully. However, a restart is required to complete the install. Please save your work and restart your computer to finish installation.

as a user, in the middle of my day, working… no i wont restart, not for a simple plugin, and the fact that i cant even use it on my default browser of choice is even more pathetic then the errored, error message.

You cant compare a product that doesnt work to a product that does work and even worse you cant say the product that doesnt work is better or going to ever compete with the working product. IMHO