... Microsoft can copy

I will not buy any phone that contains Silverlight and will also start spreading the word that anyone who purchases a phone containing that piece of shite will be paying more than they should because part of the cost of the phone is going to Microsoft - ie they are paying a Microsoft tax.

Microsoft make me laugh. The describe the GPL as cancer because it attaches itself to anything it touches (which is not true) but what are Microsoft. Using Silverlight as an example Microsoft are a disease as they try to infect as many things as possible. We need to find a cure and find it soon otherwise the whole world is doomed!

Paris - Because I bet she likes Silver and hates doing it in the light! Or because, like Microsoft, she doesn't pay any tax. :o)

"The benefit is you write your application to Silverlight, stick it on a web server, and now you can go ahead and target these devices,"

Never seen the likes of this before. Good to know we can count on MS to innovate.

I doubt it, it doesn't even support PowerPC Macs for version 2.0!

Microsoft, go and invent something new and useful instead of copying Adobe. One Flash is enough for the world.

You will be assimilated

wrong - one Flash is too much for the world the way it gets misused by web developers

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

You have been warned.

@John Miles

Hehe! That's what I meant. ;)

One Flash is already one more than the world needs, we certainly don't need two more than the world needs.

We definately don't need an open souce alternative either as then we'll have three bandwidth sucking resource whores.

@frymaster

What does "I've used" mean? Developed in ... or just watched an advert or navigated a site in Flash/Silverlight?

It's 100x more productive to develop for silverlight than for flash or ajax, at least for real world apps. MS have made top notch, low cost dev tools and api and so it's of very little cost in any measure to develop for it. It will succeed, whether a handful of overly-vocal aspergers like it or not.

Silverlight 2.0 (currently in beta) is way more productive to devlop in than Flash. IMHO whether the resulting app is 'better' or 'worse' or 'the same' as it's Flash equivalent is irrelevant really, it's the devlopment experience that is going to win over people; and the joy of being able to debug Silverlight code in the Visual Studio IDE beats the Flash development experience hands down.

... Apple can copy

(and of course reverse)

Just to chuck an anti-Apple rant in the mix for good measure :-)

As for Flash though it's more a case of anything XYZ can do, Adobe will buy, ruin, bloat, and install crud on your machine worse than anything Microsoft can do (e.g. "Adobe Reader and the 100% CPU of doom").