Michael Arrington argues silverlight is the future of the web

The interesting thing to me in this story is that MSFT spent ten hours selling Arrington on this. They must really care what the startup community thinks of them.

If I were in his position, though, I'd be cautious about saying stuff like "Silverlight will be the platform of choice for developers who build rich Internet applications." If this turns out to be true, it will be the first time since the mid 1980s that Microsoft has produced a platform voluntarily adopted by good hackers (as opposed to something they had to use to make stuff work on Windows).

Dudes, unless the silverlight demos was pure smoke and mirrors, and all involved blatant liars, this is pretty cool stuff. Especially coming from a bunch of dead guys :). This is something I have been hoping for from MS for a decade: website like ease of app delivery combined with a non stone age client programming model. MS is the only one with the size and reach to have any kind of shot at pulling it off. Nice to see they are finally taking their 'monopoly responsibilities' seriously. Supposed monopoly or not, size really does matter when it comes to providing us little guys with assurances that decent codecs and runtimes are present on our target market's computers ( and phones, gaming consoles etc. ). How any developers not in direct competition with MS can not like being able to do rich clients in .net + assorted tools instead of the current mix of hacked together technologies is beyond me. This doesn't mean every app has to utilize a rich client, just that for the ones that do, we can build them in a modern development environment and expect modern runtime performance. Now..... arc.net? Orders of magnitude faster than JS...

Question: Is silverlight really part of "the web"? For that matter, is Flash? (Were applets?) It seems to me that "the web" consists of things built around W3C standards, to a first approximation.

Just because something plugs into a browser doesn't make it part of "the web"; that's just a sneaky way to put a thick client on the user's computer.

I'd argue that Silverlight _might_ be the future, but it's not the web. (Whether that would suit MSFT just fine is, of course, open to speculation.)

On behalf of Linux users: MS can lightly kiss my silver ass.

Anyone else keep seeing a jockstrap when they look at the logo?

A lot has already been said, but I want to participate as well:

For those who think Arrington likely didnt took money from MSFT, for the past couple of months I was seeing MIX ads on the top banner, below the first post and on the sidebar. Is this not giving money albeit more subtly ?

For PG If you were in his position, having an exclusive interview with Ray Ozzie, a high profile lunch and ten hours of selling to go with months long ad campaigns on TC, I am not sure you would have done something different.

But I havent said here that you would have wanted to be in this position, that's a totally different thing.

I cant really understand this statement of Arrington "it blows away native Javascript routines - without exaggeration, Ajax looks like a bicycle next to a Ferrari when compared to Silverlight"

The other reason for writing this post I guess is that the previous post from Nik didnt got enough page views "Nik wrote a very long post yesterday afternoon on Silverlight, long after the initial news broke. From a pageview standpoint, the post was a loser for us. We would have been far better off doing a one-paragraph post at 10 am announcing the news, and by the time we wrote in the late afternoon the buzz had worn off somewhat."

(1) Java is dead. (2) MS recognizes Firefox and Safari - really good news. (3) MS is not dead. (4) MS should thank Anders Hejlsberg for not being dead. (3) Adobe is f...ed. (2) I hate numbering, it looks like a Basic program. (1) Is Lisp on Silverlight possible?

I can't believe it - Now I need to see what all this buzz is about. Could Silverlight from none other than MS be that good? Has anyone here tried it out? Will MS now rise from the dead?

Arrington has completely lost his credibility. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I remember hearing him at Future of Web Apps saying that Adobe's Apollo is the greatest thing ever. Now this nonesense...

Is he being paid by MS to push this crap?!? Either that or he's the most gullible blogger alive.

I'm reading promising things about Silverlight. Blowing it off because it's from Microsoft would be a mistake, though it'd be wise to be wary considering failed promises of the past.

I want to read more on hands-on SDK experiences before I think any more of it.

So I know that they're trying to say it's not just "applets 2007", but how is it all that different? There's a 4MB download, it's running a VM (a mini-CLR), and it's probably going to have security limitations.

I for one am very interested in this. I make games, and this would mean I could use the same code (Ruby!) on the desktop and web versions (right now it's not really an option unless I use Flash).

Ease of deployment/integration is the crucial issue, of course. The Javascript+DOM+xmlhtmlrequest model is just so horrendously, hackishly chicken-wired I'm always ashamed to even touch it...much less use it professionally. Flash and java applets from day ONE were superior in every, single way...utterly superior...except when it comes to deployment/integration. Java applets have the habit of seizing up the machine and mysteriously failing to load...flash is a bit better, but is gradually turning into this decade's popup launcher. Neither work well with webpages. Their failure to really become platforms just shows that an extra second or two of wait time can be a competitive killer.

But, if MSFT can do this right, goodbye javascript.

Prediction: Silverlight will turn out to be something like Frontpage.