

Microsoft.com being redesigned to push Silverlight - iamelgringo
http://neosmart.net/blog/2008/redesigned-microsoft-website-to-use-silverlight/

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nickb
That's an SEO and usability suicide. Heck, Adobe owns Flash and yet pretty
much all of their pages are in (X)HTML/CSS. They're smart enough to understand
what the place for these in-browser technologies is.

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icey
My guess is that they'll use it at first for sound / video content. I would
venture to guess that they'll bundle it as part of MSN Messenger at some point
in the future as well, since it's a small addon to the .net runtime.

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troels
They use it at <http://channel9.msdn.com/> which has prevented me from viewing
a podcast or two, which I otherwise would.

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gruseom
I bet they are doing this to get Silverlight deployed to as many computers as
they can.

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angstrom
I believe they have to as a good show of faith or else risk hypocrisy for not
touching their own dog food.

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gruseom
MS hardly have to redesign their whole website away from HTML, nor is their
history one of great effort to eschew hypocrisy. Besides, the dog food story
is easy: have a token project or two so people can't say you don't use your
own stuff. That's what MS did with SourceSafe and arguably .NET as well.

This seems to me a gutsier move. Flash's greatest strength (and Silverlight's
greatest weakness) is its installed base. MS have a big asset in the 8th most
visited website; to put it in the service of deploying Silverlight is pretty
daring and reminiscent of the MS of old... not necessarily a good thing! But
I'm just speculating and could be wrong.

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idea
Yesterday when i wanted to download something from microsoft.com i got a popup
asking if i wanted to beta test the download with Silverlight. Of course i
clicked it away. Downloading is a task of the browser. If the functionality is
poor, fix the browser. Microsoft is not alone in this. Adobe, Sun and other
companies also try to push useless download managers.

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Tichy
Sure, that's the way to get Spyware on your computer.

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mattcarbone
This just shows that they don't understand their own technology. RIA/browser
plugins have their place, but not for corporate home pages. If this was the
case then Adobe.com would be a full screen flex app and Sun.com would be an
applet.

arrg.

