
Is Microsoft up to old tricks with Silverlight? - nreece
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/08/11/technology/stream11.php
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SwellJoe
Yes. Of course.

Whenever the question is, "Is Microsoft trying to make use of their existing
dangerously strong positions in order to strengthen their positions in new
areas?" The answer is always, "Yes."

In this case, however, I just kinda have to chuckle, because it's a battle
between two companies who have always been pretty uncomfortable playing on the
level playing field of the Internet. Open standards are not the forte of
Microsoft or Adobe, and I don't think I'd lose much sleep over either one of
them taking a bit of a beating. If they want to beat _each other_ up, that's
even better.

But, I guess if I had to choose between Microsoft and Adobe which one I wanted
to be in control of my online video and multimedia experience, I would choose
Adobe. They've been Linux friendly, by some definition of friendly, for at
least a few years...though it's always seemed pretty grudging. And Flash
Player aint exactly the pinnacle of software reliability (though it seems to
be better lately...and to be fair, I suppose they could be as nasty and evil
as RealPlayer and try to do stupidly irritating stuff to my preferences every
time it fires up...but then, I guess if they'd been doing that, they'd be in
the same ghetto as RealPlayer).

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josefresco
If I had to choose sides, it would be Microsoft every damn time. Why? I'm a
web designer/developer and the software suite I use everyday from Adobe costs
roughly $1000 (every 2 years because I skip generations). The operating system
I use everyday (even when I'm not designing) cost me at most a couple hundred
dollars (prob less because it's pre-loaded)

Adobe is just plain greedy, which is criticism that could be applied to MS as
well, but dollar for dollar MS is raping me _much_ less.

~~~
dandelany
I'm not sure why you think the price of an OS vs. the price of a web/graphics
development suite is even a valid comparison to make... We're talking apples
and oranges here.

My car cost more than I pay for rent every month, but that doesn't make my
landlord any less of a douchebag.

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ashleyw
What are, for me as a user, and for "rich media content" developers, the
advantages of Silverlight over Flash?

Programming languages (just stick to interpreted, 'web' languages for this
example), all do practically the same thing, but they all exist for a simple
reason like a developers preference. Is this the same with media content such
as silverlight and flash, or is it simply Microsoft trying to become the top
dog for online media?

I'm all in for competitors, maybe Silverlight wont suck most of my Macs CPU up
when playing online video, and Adobe might work harder to make things more
efficient and better for developers, but if this is just MS trying to take
over my browser as they loose IE market share, I will be disappointed.

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dandelany
Jesse Ezell has a good blog post about this here:

[http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/05/03/silverlight...](http://weblogs.asp.net/jezell/archive/2007/05/03/silverlight-
vs-flash-the-developer-story.aspx)

~~~
ashleyw
Seems amazingly biased to me...

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dandelany
Personally, I'm all for MS bundling Silverlight with Windows. The difference
between this and the IE/Netscape debacle is that the internet browser decision
is a choice made by the user, and by bundling IE with Windows, MS essentially
made the choice for 90% of its non-tech-savvy users who didn't know they could
download a different browser. (Not to mention, I seem to recall IE was
actually a _better browser_ than Netscape. despite its awfulness today).

By bundling Silverlight with Windows, they are contributing towards making the
technology a standard, allowing _developers_ to make the choice to write
Silverlight apps rather than Flash apps without having to worry about how many
of their users have it installed / will install it. There will never be more
computers with Silverlight installed than Flash, unless Adobe makes some huge
mistakes, but by trying to make the numbers more equal, MS is giving
developers the power to write apps for the technology which best fits their
needs. Whether or not Silverlight is that technology for a majority of
developers remains to be seen.

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barryfandango
If they used flash, this story would seem ridiculous: \--

Adobe will offer U.S. Web surfers this month thousands of hours of free video
direct from the Olympics in Beijing.

The service, produced in conjunction with NBC, is being hailed as a bold
experiment in delivering on the original promise of the Web. For the first
time, it will be possible to watch specific events on demand as well as many
of the less popular sporting events, which have received scant attention in
mainstream television coverage of the games.

But there's a catch. To view the video, it will be necessary to download a
Adobe Web browser software component based on a new proprietary technology,
Flash, that is intended to make it possible to display interactive animations,
graphics, audio and video, all within a fixed window inside a Web browser
display.

Flash will work for both Macintosh and Windows PC users, and a version for
Linux is also available. A mobile version will be available on Windows Mobile
and Nokia smartphones.

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gizmo
Flash now has a monopoly on "rich" content for the browser. I think a second
player in the field is a good thing.

And since Adobe is proprietary too, it's no big loss. Silverlight might become
a -good- proprietary multimedia plugin.

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hexiumvii
As flash is THE standard, i've been forced to use it for 3 versions, i still
hate it and still have a hard time figuring out. When Expression Blend beta
came out, it only took me 2 days to figure out. I can do animations in blend
in about 2 hours what it would take days in flash. Silverlight also scales so
much better than flash, i mean flash starts to die after you get past VGA
pixel sizes. That's just sad. Silverlight scales literally to gigapixels. If
you haven't been to photosynth, check out has friggin fast it is.

