I never picked up development on Silverlight because the Linux client (Moonlight) is unusable, but its advantages are ... an efficient VM (dotNet's CLR) with real multithreading capable of running any .NET language on top, video DRM and adaptive streaming and ... this is important ... consistency between (supported) browsers and OSes.
I know normal people don't care about the first point ... but because the VM is efficient, it might just be that Silverlight is actually efficient on mobile phones (versus Flash) ... a Symbian version is already available, a MeeGo is in the works, if they add Android to that list + Windows mobile 7 ... then you've got a winner (if only they don't fuck up the implementation as Adobe did with Flash).
From Microsoft's point of view Silverlight also has another advantage ... they can add to it whatever they want. Few people complained when they added COM interoperability. They can't do that to web standards without bad publicity (though this didn't bother them in the past).
I know normal people don't care about the first point ... but because the VM is efficient, it might just be that Silverlight is actually efficient on mobile phones (versus Flash) ... a Symbian version is already available, a MeeGo is in the works, if they add Android to that list + Windows mobile 7 ... then you've got a winner (if only they don't fuck up the implementation as Adobe did with Flash).
From Microsoft's point of view Silverlight also has another advantage ... they can add to it whatever they want. Few people complained when they added COM interoperability. They can't do that to web standards without bad publicity (though this didn't bother them in the past).