Silverlight as an alternative to what?

It is truly difficult to keep up with all that is going on in the realm of the web these days and while I can say that I like to try, I think it is virtually impossible to keep up. The latest "keep up" is titled "Silverlight" by Microsoft.

Before I go into this little opinion entry, I want to share a little perspective on what seems to be a "vector revolution" going on inside of Microsoft. I was at a conference not too awefully long ago where I personally witnessed a example of this revolution, but more on that in a second. What you need to know is that Microsoft is busy getting on the Vector train from having spent many years fundamentally ignoring vector (math-based) graphics and simply focusing on what it already knew: raster (the pixelated non-scaleable type of) graphics. So now that WPF at the core of technology like Vista has taken hold, "everything is coming up vector!" So, I am at this conference where a guy is demoing some Vista feature and he shows how you can grab the handle of what is obviously a Raster embeded photo inside a power point presentation, and twist it around to resize and flip it over, "That is vector graphics at work people" (the crowd claps.) Now, knowing that has nothing to do with vector graphics I look around the room spotting smiling faces with clapping hands and the infrequent creatively dressed left-brainer scratching his or her head wondering how Microsoft made it this far into a discussion that it doesn't seem to understand. Oh, well. Back to Silverlight.

So Silverlight, a web-ified version of WPF is a vector based "flash-killer" (so I have read) that can deliver raster images, video, guessing it can delvier audio (though I haven't seen that yet) and can draw vector images. But this is about where Silverlight ends in it's similarity with Flash. The functionality under a Silverlight application is very limited, with a convoluted round-trip model for talking to servers for more data (you would have to use Ajax- also convoluted- to do some of the fetching and then XAML-fy that result to programmatically pump new info/interaction into Silverlight.) So, in short, without attacking more details, I don't see how this is actually a good or healthy competition for Adobe Flash. It is like imagining that some new wrist PDA would be considered a "desktop computer killer," when in reality no wrist PDA could compete with a desktop computer. It wouldn't be close. Since the wrist PDA doesn't do as much, the next question might be, well, maybe it is in a class of it's own? Well, maybe not. When you consider that a typical Ajax app coupled with Quicktime can do about as much as Silverlight... today, you start to imagine that it isn't in it's own class. It is simply outclassed. "But what about drawing vector art? It can do that!" - Yes it can. But IE could draw vector art for years in a little something called Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) - a format that just didn't take off. The bottom line is, competition is a good thing, but I think the launch of Silverlight was and is a bit premature. They have about 10 years of catchup to even come close to the category of competing with Adobe Flash. So, for now I guess I am simply left explaining to clients that "want the next Silverlight killer-app" that at best I could offer them is the "next Silverlight presentation" but killer-app it will not be.

We all know that Microsoft is nearly never first-to-market with anything. But they catch up fairly quickly in many cases (and even legitimately overtake the competition with improvements) and the same might be true for Silverlight. So one eye might be well placed on the progress of that technology. But having said that, everyone knows that Microsoft never understood "design" (ie. creative design- not one of the 4 phases of project management) and so I think the subtleties of creative expression and creative needs will be lost on this giant as they attempt to churn out a business approach to developing "creative software" or solutions.