I watched Scott's part of the ket note on steam. He did mainly speak about Silverlight, but then, that's the new one.

I hadn't previously subscripted to the "Silverlight = Flash killer", but watching the demos etc, they put a lot of effort into it, and Adobe have some serious competition.

When Scott was talking about getting Silerlight onto phones, he said they'd be looking beyond Windows Mobile and Nokia, and pointedly said "anything with an SDK". It seemed like he was saying "Apple."

By contrast, I've just returned from "LotusSphere Comes to You" in Sydney, Australia where I was pretty much overwhelmed by the amount of innovation from IBM in their already released products.

Their roadmap for future products was pretty impressive too.

Maybe Ray should have stayed at Lotus.

Ray would at least have a future in building software now instead of being a barker for an advertising freak show.

"they put a lot of effort into it, and Adobe have some serious competition."

Ummm... actually, no.

They did not put a lot of effort into it given it's supposed to be an engine for the next level of actuating the internet.

Adobe AIR has been in beta since June 2006. Silverlight is over 20 months late by that measure.

And comparing Silverlight capability against AIR is stunning.

Silverlight is greatly limited... almost on purpose.

I think Ballmer has decided to take Microsoft out of software production and headlong into advertising and the way Ozzie is touting Silverlight as an advertising platform and the limited capabilities and sand-bagging in IE, you Microsoft developers are being seduced into leaving software development behind. I hope you like doing advertising "enhancements".

portuno:

Silverlight is a .Net runtime for cross-platform, cross=browser. Its benefit is also its limitation - it runs in the browser.

But its a .Net runtime. If you've got code you wrote for Silverlight, and you want to run it on the desktop, no problem, just run it on the desktop CLR, or the server CLR, or a mobile CLR, or on Mono on Linux.

When you compare Flash+Flex+AIR against, as Scott called it "the .Net Continuum", including breadth and depth of APIs, language choices, tooling, books, education resource, bodies of extant code (including a lot of open source), adoption in the market place, and sheer numbers of developers, well, most of what you said is revealed for the uninformed rubbish it is.

Buffy, your "continuum" is an old train that's been a very dark tunnel for a long time.

http://www.betanews.com/article/Silverlight_2_Beta_1_debuts_with_the_hope_of_dynamic_language_support/1204759826

Read the article. It's very instructive. Ozzie saying and Microsoft saying doesn't make it so no matter how hard we all wish to make it so.

You can either DO it today... or you can't do it. And all this "one day, pie in the sky, honest we'll get there eventually" act Microsoft has pulled for years is now transparent to the industry and the market.

It's quite obvious Microsoft technology is crippled and can't run on its own. It needs lawyers to pave the way and it needs careful wording by marketing to trick the gullible into believing they received something valuable.

First, I have two statements to make:
1. I have always been a Microsoft apologist, as I worked for IBM many years, as a microcode design engineer. Ergo, I know the impossibility of releasing a huge amount of code, without having all problems solved, in either alpha, or beta test. In fact all possibilities of timing, error types, etc. can not possibly be foreseen in testing. You have the enormous numbers of OEM hardware, and software being added to your original code. So, it is not from the vacuum of a regular user that I write this letter.
2. I am not xenophobic, and do not write this from a bias based on gender, race, color, religion, or national origin. I am however, sensitive to being sold "help" that does not understand my fundamental language, nor has the ability to help me. Having an apologetic, non English fluent, only basically knowledgeable person, CHARGING me, to be put on hold, suffer phone line drops, each time reconnecting to a different person, with the same skill set, repeating over and over the same information, each time being told that the problem was either mine, or my HP laptop, which had been running XP-SP2, IE7 with automatic updates enabled flawlessly, until upgrading to SP3-RC2.
With those 2 informational harbingers, I will relate my reason to switching to another vendor/vendors for my business.
Disregarding the wisdom of,"IF IT ISN'T BROKEN DON'T FIX IT!" I also know that if we follow that caveat, we would still be running DOS. I feel very comfortable in Beta testing a product, knowing that a restore will remove any problem, and without a loss of data, allowing me to continue processing. I was on a business trip to Phoenix, and being bored, reading only superficially the problems with SP3, I decided to upgrade(ha) my 2 year old HP laptop, running an Intel Pentium4 processor, 2 gig of memory, and an HDD only 20% full, and my ISP being Verizon, using a PCMCIA 5750 card all of which has been running XP SP2 & IE7 flawlessly for months. I went to MS web site downloading the upgrade with no errors, of any type. The system assured me that the download was successful, it was time to do a system restart and continue. I did the restart with my machine stopping to ask for my power on password, as normal, I entered the PW without incident and waited, albeit a long time. I reentered the PW and the same stop occurred. After 4 x I knew I had a problem. I used F8 to try to get into safe mode, but I only got an error stop with C0000139 unable to get an entry point into GDI32.dll. Since the laptop was bought with the software installed, I could not get to a point where I could do a search for that .dll, I then made a call to MS for help, at which point I was transferred to either India or Bangladesh, from there it was hours of on hold time, dropped calls, different "techs" on each call, to put it nicely it was a nightmare. They wanted to blame everything from HP, Verizon's inability to do long downloads, etc. couple that with the inability to communicate on even a basic level, I decided that I was throwing good money after bad at $0.46 per min. as they tried switching me from one inept person to another. I concluded the call, so upset that MS charges me $100.00 and I was not even offered anything close to help (even in the most basic sense of that word), that I reloaded XPsp1, provided by HP, building it to SP2, then spending the night adding IE7 with all the long patches etc. I lost at minimum 30% of the data on my HDD, which included, but was not limited to raw customer data, some programs written but not compiled, even a few compiled programs that were written and compiled the previous day. As a computer consultant, losing my business would be a drop in the proverbial MS Bucket, but losing the numbers of customers that I influence will be substantial. If you read the first line of this letter, I have for years taken the time to explain the difficulties of maintaining a large Operating System, either IBM's MVS or your XP. But this incident has clearly shown to me, that MS is not interested in quality help, only how much money it can make, regardless of the pain or losses suffered by your user base. I am switching Fire Fox and Linux with all due speed, and recommending that to all who ask for my advice. I am opening a blog, writing a web page detailing the debacle from iYogi "support". visiting all germane technical chat rooms, and contacting the several technical magazines I subscribe to, detailing Microsoft's lack of off peak hour support. I do not do this lightly, as I have supported your company for years, but enough is enough! The fix to the problem I was having was detailed on a google search, which if your overseas support had looked for, instead of denying any MS complicity, I would not be writing this. message