Microsoft Planning Big Things For Silverlight ~ Random Tech Stuff

While Adobe's CFO recently said Microsoft's Silverlight plug-in has recently "fizzled out," Microsoft has big plans ahead for its rich Internet application platform and continues to get some key customer wins.

"We're not seeing any slow down at all," Chris Swenson, Microsoft senior strategy manager for the .Net platform, said in an interview. "We're ahead of our deployment targets, we're ahead of our sales targets. In every key metric, we're ahead of the game."

Within one month of Silverlight 2.0's release in October, Microsoft says there were more than 100 million successful installations of the plug-in on consumer machines. Based on worldwide surveys of its developers, the company estimates more than 500,000 developers have at least toyed with Silverlight.

This week, Microsoft announced that CBS Sports would be using Silverlight to stream college basketball games during the NCAA tournament. CBS already is using Silverlight for a number of college sports broadcasts online. The Presidential Inauguration Committee also used Silverlight for the official Web video stream of the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January, including support for a prerelease version of Moonlight, the Linux version of Silverlight. Other major customers include Netflix, Blockbuster, AOL, and the NBC Olympics site.

Microsoft is looking for new avenues to make Silverlight ubiquitous. The Novell-led Mono project announced the availability of Moonlight 1.0 a few weeks ago. Moonlight has been compiled for most major Linux distributions, including Fedora Core, Open SUSE, Novell SUSE, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. An Eclipse project called Eclipse4SL is also working on developing Silverlight tools for Eclipse.

It's also relying on old tactics, like using Silverlight in Microsoft Web pages or to power Microsoft Web applications. For example, Microsoft uses Silverlight in its MSN Toolbar and in places like a presentation on the economic downturn on MSN Money's Web site. Upon the release of Windows 7, hardware vendors will be able to opt to include it in standard configurations. The next version of Office will include a Silverlight-powered rich Web application for editing and sharing documents.

However, Microsoft still has a long way to go if it ever hopes to catch Adobe's Flash technology. While Adobe brags that some version of Flash is now installed on 99% of all Internet-enabled PCs, Microsoft's most recent estimate -- the company plans to announce new penetration numbers at its MIX Web development conference next month -- was that Silverlight is installed on about 25% of all Internet-enabled personal computers.

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