Microsoft's latest silver bullet
Microsoft yesterday released version 2.0 of Silverlight, the company’s alternative to Flash for delivering rich multimedia through web browsers. The company also said that it would provide development funding for including Silverlight capabilities in the popular open source Eclipse development environment.
Although Silverlight 1.0 was release just over a year ago, a large segment of the online world has had little or no contact with Silverlight. Microsoft itself estimates that one in four computer users have access to a PC with Silverlight installed.
Although the company is spinning that number as a victory, the truth is that the company needs to expand its user base significantly to get a lead on Flash which is already widely supported. By working with open source community Microsoft is hoping to achieve exactly this.
Silverlight, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, "represents a radical improvement in the way developers and designers build applications on the Web. This release will further accelerate our efforts to make Silverlight, Visual Studio and Microsoft Expression Studio the preeminent solutions for the creation and delivery of media and rich Internet application experiences."
Silverlight is currently only supported on Microsoft’s Windows platform and Mac OSX.
Microsoft Silverlight discussion
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