Microsoft’s Silverlight platform intrigues me, not unlike a terrible auto accident on I-45. Here’s what The House of Gates has to say about it:

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.

Okay, check me on this, fellow geeks.

It’s a dot-Net gizmo to deliver media-based content. Let’s see–what other platforms, some of which aren’t Microsoft-owned–exist to do this?

• Flash
• Some PHP plugins
• The Windows Media platform toolkit
• Java (antiquated)
• etc.

I freely admit that I am not a Microphile. However, I’m not a rabid MS-hata, either. The cold truth is that Bill Gates has simply played the game much, much better than his competitors. None of the Microsoft products are perfect, but let’s face it–they are better than anything else, especially with respect to office productivity. Everybody bitches and moans about Word and Excel, but everybody uses them.

My principal problem with Microsoft is the exorbitant fees for licensing that are charged. If you have 90% market share, you can afford to quit ass-raping your customers. However, that does not seem to be Microsoft’s business plan, more’s the pity. And don’t get me started on the 31 flavors of Vista.

But I digress–this is about Silverlight.

I run an information technology company. It is populated with a group of very senior engineers in systems, networks, and infrastructure that are all at the top of their form. Let me take one example from one of these departments as an object lesson: Infrastructure. First their was thick coax, and it was good. Then there was thin coax, 10 years later. It, also, was good. Cat 5, cat 5e, Cat 6, fiber…all good. But in those two sentences, I’ve covered the last 50 years of data communications. In short, engineers come up with a faster, bigger, meaner pipe when circumstances demand it.

Let’s transfer this simple, sound logic to Silverlight.

ANYONE who has ever had the painful, wrenching opportunity to code applications using dot-Net will at least agree on the fact that this platform has always had problems, whether these take the form of “more bugs than a decomposing murder victim” or “as insecure as US telephone records.” Furthermore, with the ubiquity and relative stability and security of Flash, is this simply another effort by Dr. Gates to horn in on another market with a substandard, but very familiar product?

I tend to think “Yes, it is,” but other opinions are welcome. Enlighten me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 17th, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Technology, Coding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.