But do I have to block more of this <add animal excrement of your choice here> from web sites that I visit?

I browsed to a site that uses Silverlight the other day. All I got was a totally blank screen. At least with flash, you know that there is something that you can play if you want to.

Thumbs down because crap website designers will start creating whole sits with this sh1t.

Some time ago RyanAir changed their working "destinations" page to use this nonsense, and so anyone using Linux can't see where they go to (and consequently buy anything from them). Interesting to go to a non-cross-platform and cut off many of your users ...

But it will be popular on corporate intranets. Web app front ends are still somewhat lacking in performance and features when compared to client executables running on every user's machine. This would seem to fix that problem nicely.

It's all about building and maintaining the developer base. People tend to develop applications using tools that they know. Flash and Ruby on Rails may be teh awesome, but if Megacorp has a gross of .NET programmers on the payroll, they'll start using Silverlight.

just what I wanted..

I work for a large corp and we already have developers requesting to use this for both intranet apps and client facing apps.

Zero concept of people using anything other than windows and IE, no care for forcing yet another plugin on people, no appetite for avoiding vendor lockin.

Chalk up another win for MS.

you beat me to it. I'm a .net developer and I was thinking the exact same thing. large corporate internal environments with lots of .net developers out of university love doing this sort of thing

It happens like this

developer - I'm just out of uni and don't know much but ooh this looks sexy

it manager - yeah do whatever. it must be good because its ms and we spend so much on them

i've been privy to a LOT of situations like this

for websites thought there's not a chance in hell i'd use it, why reinvent the wheel when it works perfectly well as it is?

ms need to spend less time trying to take on adobe and spend more time creating a decent operating system

I think dismissing Silverlight is a bit premature.

As a .NET developer, within 5 minutes of taking my first steps in looking at Silverlight I could see where it is going.

Dismissing .NET as "shite" is coming from a position of ignorance. Microsoft's biggest problem is actually in playing a different sort of catch-up in a market that is not really their traditional line of business. But once they begin to, look out... because I think that to evolve Silverlight from where it is now (infancy really) to delivering very very serious web-served business apps in a browser is going to be relatively easy for them to do. I'm kind of astonished that .NET is sometimes dismissed off-hand, because it has developed to a very powerful stage, and if there is one game in which I WOULDN'T want to be taking on MS it is that one.

Competitors are in a sense coming from opposite ends of the planet. Flash has the established market position, and has been evolving into a business technology. Microsoft already has that underlying technology. Serious technology. Personally, if I was say Macromedia I as sure as hell wouldn't be smugly dismissive.

As for a difficulty in understanding the emerging MS technologies, isn't that true of anything? VS 2008 and .NET 3.5 has coincided with an explosion of new technologies... Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, LINQ, Silverlight, so on. They have some real learning curves associated, but that's proportionate to what's under the hood.

Anyway, back to work... if .NET is shite I have developed some strange fetishes, because Visual Studio and the .NET platform seriously turns me on. At the end of the day we each understand the technologies that we live with. How well MS can market Silverlight.. who knows? But if it begins to gain acceptance... it could be competitors playing their own kind of catch up.

If MS had managed to coordinate themselves well enough and get the tech up to scratch so they could PhotoSynth as a Silverlight application, I think that would have done a better job of convincing people that Silverlight was actually a really powerful and worthwhile new technology.

Without a killer ap like that that will really wow end users, all that will happen is people get put off by the Microsoft smell. WPF, LINQ and so on may be great tools for developers, but important as that is, a development environment that turns on a few developers isn't enough.