Theories about where MSFT wants to go? Check this out for a bit of convergence…

Could Microsoft out-Apple Adobe?

Let’s examine a few trends and remember that Apple beat its competitors in the education market twenty years ago by having a rabid fan base along with compelling intuitive software.  Microsoft Live’s community had 60 million users last time I checked. Working within the existing Live framework will be critical for any Learning Management Systems (LMS) play that Microsoft chooses to do in the future.

The eLearning potential with Microsoft’s (NASD: MSFT) current portfolio of hardware and software, part of which is the XBox brand, is gaining momentum. I’ve been discussing current instructional design trends with instructional designers, consumer media analysts, military training officers, and gamers. We’ve reached current consensus:

There are a lot of benefits to using the XBox 360 as a training / eLearning platform, primarily because of the XBox Live community.

Having solid revenue generating Intellectual Property (IP) in both hardware and software gives a strong advantage to MSFT in this space. Windows Live Mesh is self descriptive; it meshes all the services together.

How Does Live Mesh Work?

From Ten things to know about Microsoft’s Live Mesh | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

Live Mesh builds on the cloud storage, management, service and provisioning and computational fabric that other Microsoft Live services use. On top of that, Live Mesh uses the same identity, synchronized storage and connectivity services that Microsoft uses for other Live offerings.

The “platform” services (a k a the “developer stack”) include the new Mesh Framework, as well as both a cloud and a client software run-time Mesh Operating Environment (MOE).

Live Mesh “experiences” from Microsoft and third-party providers will build on top of these layers.

Windows Live Mesh will make use of Silverlight as Michael Cote explained in People Over Process » Market Context for Silverlight – A Brief Q&A:

Q: What is your overall feeling about Silverlight at this time?

A: At the moment, Silverlight feels like it’s going to be on a full-on contender with Flash and Flex in a short time. Silverlight 2.0 is supposed to bring in the more “hard core” GUI programming features that Flex has.

Perhaps Microsoft’s Mesh project will address the offline synch tick-list of AIR. Then, the battle will be over ubiquity, developer hearts and minds, and control of the web.

Through the PC Silverlight allows some scary-good functionality.

Think about having Instructional Design teams building applications that can reach outside and into the web page itself: From More about Silverlight – Microsoft’s Flex / Flash Competitor

Further to that, Silverlight applications can access and manipulate the browser DOM (meaning they can reach outside and into the webpage itself) so once the Silverlight runtime is more common expect to see many developers of web applications tap into Silverlight for both a performance increase and for better visual enhancements and user experience.

This is important. We are now looking at two-way communication with Silverlight.

Available Silverlight eLearning Tools

I’ve seen a growing demand in Google hits on my site for how to take Captivate content and put it into Silverlight. People are asking about how to take the output from this market dominating tool and repurpose it into Silverlight and this is only the beginning.

Imagine having software tutorials buildable by instructional design staff that can be quickly hashed into something usable for the XBox 360, through XBox Live, or through Windows Live Mesh…

La Jolla-based MadCap Software’s Mimic (Adobe Captivate and TechSmith Camtasia competitor) outputs in Silverlight format. I haven’t heard whether TechSmith or Adobe are intending to put this into their products within the next release cycle.

Where is eLearning in all of this?

There are some other very significant benefits aside from Silverlight; meshing all of these services together adds Windows Live Writer and Instant Messaging in as well.

One benefit is in reaching people through advertising as well as explaining the process: Simple Instructions Work Best and Sell Products

Finding your audience is something that every Marketing person desires to do. Explaining a process so that an audience gets the point is what every Technical Communicator desires to do.

With Microsoft’s Live platform they’ve integrated both of these within their Instant Messaging client.

Regarding Windows Live Writer from Web 2.0 – Windows Live Writer reviewed for blogging:

Yet another entry from MSFT into the Web 2.0 space such as with the Silverlight framework which allows two-way communication from a website, and oh yes… this is for free. That’s pretty disruptive.

Adding to the chaos is the mash of what has occurred within the current eLearning space. Market analysis of eLearning from 2008 Corporate Learning Factbook Values U.S. Training Market at $58.5B:

* E-learning has grown dramatically. The use of self-study e-learning now accounts for 20% of student hours, up from last year’s figure of 15%.

This growth is driven largely by an increase in online training among small organizations (100-999 employees), which are acquiring the skills and technology to make online training a reality.

Analysis: Adobe Media Player, my @%$

The shaky economy plays into this. Re-education of adults is becoming a critical factor in economic restructuring. If industry is closing down, concessions from the unions force retraining. Cost efficient training is a growth industry.

While Adobe (NASD: ADBE)is repositioning itself and firing divisions, Microsoft has an advantage into the eLearning market and can leverage their existing Rich Internet Applications. If MSFT can duplicate what Apple did in the 1980s and entrench themselves into education, it will mean long term success in a disrupted market which has $58.5 billion in potential.

This model could effectively work even with a poor economy and would build an OS-free eLearning model built on IP within hardware and software which could be used globally.

Well, here we go again… Acording to the zedia flash blog, we’re not seeing what we should through Google:

It’s a pretty shocking title with all the fuss about the new flash player for Google and Yahoo, but I will try to explain why I came to this conclusion. I suggest you read about the seven test cases I did because that’s mostly what my reasoning is built on. I am going to explain point by point what happened in the experiment.

From another reputable blogging source comes this: SWF indexing is a red herring, and you should all know that by now

So, here we go again, Google has annonced that they will index SWF files with a new algorithm and the whole Flash blogosphere echobox is ringing with the words of the clueless. The announcement shows how little Google understands about Flash websites and needlessly diverts the attention away from developing a real solution to Flash website search engine optimization. The reaction to Google’s announcement also shows how little the Flash bloggers understand about the problem. I’m not sure which of these two is the most annoying.

The bottom line is that SWF indexing is a lost cause, it will not make a difference, and the only thing that has changed is that now Google is even better at finding nothing.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you about this coming up… Clearly IE8 and Silverlight is a triple threat when looking towards adoption of RIA.

From The Register:

TechEd 2008 Bill Gates has announced the next betas of Internet Explorer 8 and Silverlight 2 while outlining plans from Microsoft on development services…

The second beta of Microsoft Silverlight cross-browser media player and development platform will be released by the end of this week under a Go Live license. 

A Go Live license lets developers use pre-release code in real-world applications, but without the safety net of Microsoft support.

The second beta had been promised for the second half of 2008, so it’s… early!

As for Bill Gates’ last day, this YouTube video is pretty good with some great celeb cameos.

FWIW, GoLive is pretty cool. I’ve been working on a review for some time updating us on Silverlight and GoLive. With all the hubbub going on for me we’ll see how that looks for later this week.

Related Articles:

Rich Internet Applications War Is Brewing

Adobe FLEX vs Microsoft Silverlight Part 1

More about Silverlight – Microsoft’s Flex / Flash Competitor

How to convert 60 million users to Silverlight quickly

My LMS / eLearning Disruptive Technology Concept

Halo 3, XBox and Technical Communication? (Part 5)

Microsoft Releases Silverlight, Extends Support to Linux

CharlesJeter.com Category: Rich Internet Applications

Great roundup of Rich Internet Application authoring technologies from Emerging Technologies – Application Development – RIA War Is Brewing

There’s a war brewing on the Web today–a war to decide how Web applications and content will be developed and how users will consume the content of the future Web.

But this isn’t the latest round in the browser wars. No, the war I’m talking about is over the RIA (rich Internet application), a type of Web application that can run independently of browsers, can run on any operating system and, in many ways, works like a traditional desktop application.

Of course, RIAs aren’t new. They can be traced back to earlier efforts such as Macromedia’s Shockwave, Java applets and the ubiquitous Flash format.

Analysis of RIA and Wireless Data

When I was in the wireless data game, one of the main questions that people were trying to answer back in 2000 and 2001 was, how do we earn revenue streams from the broadband wireless market we’re about to implement?

The hierarchy for web and internet usage at the time was:

1) email

2) search

Since email and search were text-based, attracting rich internet users across the bandwidth was difficult to make a business case for.

As Yoram Baltinester, NVTL’s Business Development guru stated in a meeting back then, people look towards their desktops for the rich experience for a lot of reasons. They didn’t look at their mobile devices for the same rich content, primarily due to battery life and the form factor of the screen size.

As the Apple iPhone has demonstrated, there’s a good platform for display. Slingbox and other content middleware distribution hardware shows that there’s a need for content to be pushed out.

RIA Content Delivery

What’s known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) plays a part in this as well.

One blogpost, Full-length shows, even movies, growing on cellular challenges the validity of providing multiple content for multiple viewing platforms:

The question I have is, are we ready to take it to this level? It doesn’t change what’s required much on the CDN side. In fact, it probably increases our capacity since we’re dealing with smaller files of lower resolution. Now we have to maintain separate environments though for HD and mobile.

So this is a valid point. Are we ready? I think the overall answer remains can profit be made on this? Here we are eight years later, and it’s not really a significant portion of the market. You’re stuck with obtaining either rich, HD-ready content or low-resolution mobile deliverable content.

The cellular carriers have now developed the bandwidth, but everyone’s not so sold on the money to be made. And the bandwidth is sketchy at best for full capacity voice and data. I could care less what the marketing people say, there’s a point of saturation that nobody likes to talk about, where you’re not going to be able to keep a call because there’s too many bits dropping off.

That means wireless data is scalable only to a certain point. Let’s face it, providers don’t make more money putting up more towers. They make more money by cutting operating costs. Whether it’s in powering down the towers during offpeak hours or through chopping bandwidth hogs who have all you can eat accounts (like yours truly) they have to save time and bandwidth on the digital phone networks. Who gets priority reads like a conspiracy theory since that’s a tightly guarded secret.

XBox Live customers can download HD content relatively easily from their home network, but it’s currently trapped in the device.

Analysis of RIA and Technical Communication

TechComm is not always tailored for instruction, however breaking down the modules of a device or software program can make instructional content which could be repurposed.

I would think that dropping in a spinning 3D picture of a component might help identify it conceptually, however the time and expense of placing that picture in from scratch is prohibitive. 

eLearning – tremendous advantages with a native RIA developed application. Here are a couple related articles, mainly about the Silverlight entry into RIA:

How to convert 60 million users to Silverlight quickly

My LMS / eLearning Disruptive Technology Concept

Halo 3, XBox and Technical Communication? (Part 5)

Microsoft Releases Silverlight, Extends Support to Linux

Technical Writing – Adobe has added Acrobat 3D to their Technical Communication Suite for a reason; a picture is worth a thousand words, as long as the picture is understood well enough.

However, it’s not been enough to impress industry power users: Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite Panned By TechComm Bloggers 

I’m still searching for where exactly RIA will fit within the future of Technical Communication. Adobe’s had some product evangelists segue into Technical Communication being rich media, less written word, more universally understood documentation.

I’m not so sure I’m buying that though.

Are we really going to want our instructions in podcast or YouTube format?

Just make the online Microsoft Download Center out of Silverlight. They have to download it to get their Product updates…

Oen blog, Beyond the Curtains states in its article MS To Push Silverlight Via Redesigned Microsoft.com:

It’s a desperate move, there’s no doubt about it. While Microsoft will no doubt be making an alternative HTML interface available for a mixture of legal and practical purposes, switching Microsoft.com over to Silverlight is a sure-fire way to get that attention…. and depending on how it’s both marketed and carried out, it could be what it takes to make developers start taking Silverlight seriously.

Flash vs Silverlight? No, think Flex vs Silverlight.

They are both Rich Internet Application (RIA) dev platforms looking for an audience. Earlier this year pundits on both sides traded smack talk about the technology war between Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) and Adobe (NASD: ADBE) coming over the Rich Internet Application marketplace.

This Rich Internet Application battle frames Macromedia’s absorption into Adobe more clearly, and explains why Technical Communication may have taken a back seat while MACR was digested. Obviously there were much bigger fish to fry than dealing with the RoboHelp product and Flex is a top tier product.

Flex / Flash vs Silverlight Analysis:

Here’s my Executive Summary of where I see this war going:

Silverlight will very likely oWn 70% or more of the browser market share by 2009.

Browsers will likely support both Flash and Silverlight unless you’re living in a data cave with an insane IT manager who steadfastly refuses to allow web downloadable content.

Microsoft has a clear advantage pushing Silverlight into the hardcore programming world. Visual Basic users probably won’t convert to Flex but they will use Silverlight. Their base has a good business model.

Adobe has a clear advantage within their the web based programming world. Flex loyalists will never convert. Flash content will not go away, but it will get very frustrating to justify on a business sense because it is highly likely that Microsoft will be pounding away at every opportunity with browser security updates. This tactic could force the Flash source developers to constantly redo their work, costing money and time.

Adobe is betting a lot on anti-trust going their way, but with Internet Explorer’s share of the market dropping to 85%, I think they may have a very hard sell.

Any tools that aid in going from one standard to another will be in demand. An import or decompiler tool built to bring open source Flex and/or Flash .fla files into Silverlight would be a very hot application. 

A .swf to .fla decompiler which could create usable input for Silverlight would also be a very hot application.

Evangelists tangle in the Web 2.0 space like there’s a Crusade going on

There is clearly a Web 2.0 war of words playing out regarding Flex and Silverlight. This is a dynamic of Web 2.0 that I looked at earlier on this blog with Cluetrain Manifesto Approach To Conversational Marketing

One side, Microsoft, fights by claiming that there is no war and developers can easily use both. The other side, Adobe, has been strapping on the shootin’ irons since the announcement back in April 2007.

One Adobe Evangelist’s version is that people are stupid for going to Silverlight and “should have their head examined” (yes, that’s an actual Adobe Evangelist’s quote!!!).

More on those views, with quotes later. Let’s get into the meat of the subject.

Development platforms: The RIA Cold War between Adobe and Microsoft

The dev platform battle looks like the Sun Tsu type of perfect storm that Microsoft was born to fight and as one user pointed out (complete quote below the fold)

…to think Adobe will ever have the enterprise scalability, DRM, Compression size, Bandwidth management, CDN support, HD quality, live broadcasting, developer api’s, hardware device accessibility (including STB’s, Mobile devices, XBox360′s, and HD-DVD players), is wishing for something that frankly the war is over on.

Advantage: Microsoft. Clearly.

In the developer’s arena both companies have separate strengths.

Microsoft’s Development Advantages

Microsoft enjoys a distinct edge due to their tools having being commonplace for developers for generations of product cycles, and they offer Silverlight as the way to open end a media solution. The funny thing is, I know plenty of Visual Studio developers who don’t do web stuff, so Flex is pretty much unknown for them. There’s a market there.

Microsoft isn’t giving Adobe any more free rides. Ever.

While Windows XP shipped with Flash Player installed, Windows Vista did not. That’s not by chance. Internet Explorer 8 is coming out in 2008 or 2009. I doubt seriously whether PDF reader technology or Flash Player will be included.

Advantage clearly falls to Microsoft. However anyone can download the Flash Player the first time they go to a website that has Flash.

Adobe’s Development Advantages

Websites are going further and further down into richer and richer entry pages, graphics and Flash taking up the entire front page real estate. Flex’s base of users is hardcore and dedicated.

Adobe enjoys a distinct edge within the web-authoring community with their Macromedia derived products. Flex has been out there for a couple generations with plenty of plugins available, and people know it.

Fourth, there is a conventional war coming soon between Windows Media (WMS) and Adobe Media Player which frames the Silverlight entry strategy as a very savvy move.

What’s Adobe doing with that Media Player?

Apparently Adobe is betting on its Flash penetration giving it an advantage in shoehorning users into downloading the Adobe Media Player, and Microsoft enjoys the simple advantage of being able to offer Windows Media Player as they have done for nearly ten cycles as an integrated part of the Windows operating system.

From Microsoft vs Adobe Smackdown – Silverlight and Adobe Media Player:

It seems to me that the ultimate winner in this battle will be the one to push the greatest number of users from one platform to another: from Windows to Silverlight, and from Flash to Adobe Media Player. Both companies seem to have a good shot at doing that, meaning that the ultimate victor is just too hard to call.

InfoWar: Not just for Tom Clancy anymore…

Countering negative opinion in the Web 2.0 world seems to have become the new front lines in marketing. This was directly answered in last year’s co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto’s joint speech with the founder of Technorati.

Opinion: I think the title of Evangelist should be changed to Mercenary. Researching Silverlight has been enlightening and it really has become a classic example of information warfare:

…misinformation such as one knowledgeable source claiming that a distributable file is TEN TIMES the size of its actuality shows job security for the Evangelist who must correct that rumor/untruth ASAP before damage is done.

And here I’ve been doing my reviews on an ad hoc basis.

MSFT Silverlight InfoWar Position: Grow the entire pie bigger instead of fighting over the size of the slice

According to one blog’s comments area, the MSFT RIA Evangelist states that their viewpoint is that the race is not a sprint, it’s a marathon, and further states that their position is that you can use both and don’t have to drop one for the other.

This is reassuring because first, it answers the contention that MSFT is starting another abandonware product and second that their (stated) position is not open warfare against the entrenched market leader, Adobe.

One quote from a MSFT Evangelist:

if you find that Silverlight (Great Experience) isn’t your cup of tea then you could always revert back to ASP.NET AJAX (Good Experience) or better yet upscale to WPF (Ultimate Experience). There is a degree of depth in which you can move in and out of the product stack.

However, as Claus Topholt, one blog author pointed out:

However, I’m pretty sure that when Scott Guthrie says that Silverlight 2.0 will be a “superset of Flex functionality”, he’s not thinking “right tool, right job, right time” – he’s thinking “Flash killer”. Which is fair enough, of course!

There’s a reason why questions go unanswered…

Interesting also is what MSFT is not saying. In one of their Silverlight product developer’s blogs this question concerning Windows Update as a distribution method for Silverlight went completely unanswered:

Why not push Silverlight out to all Windows users via Microsoft Update?  Let’s not mess around here!  The two big challenges Silverlight faces is adoption of the plug in and a strong artist and developer community. You can’t have a vibrant industry support until the install base gets above 90%.  Flash, the dominant format in this space has adoption rates of 96% (v9) to 98% (v6). 

I think MSFT is being quiet about their clear advantage. This comment’s author may not realize that 85% of the browsers that Flash work on happen to be Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Can’t we all just sing Cumbayah like the nice man asks? Apparently NOT!

Adobe doesn’t see things that way at all. It’s an adversarial zero-sum game, and they’re definitely on the defensive as they send their mercenaries / hatchet-men / evangelists out to do battle.

Maybe that’s why Jeremy Allaire, prior MACR Flash giant and ColdFusion creator, is integrating Silverlight into his new company Brightcove’s products. He did mention that Adobe was incredibly fast at sensing a threat from Silverlight and introducing the v.264 video support earlier this year. See my post about that: Major Flash Player Upgrade |  eLearning Impact of Flash vs. Silverlight

Adobe InfoWar Position: Stab the hand reaching the slice of pie with your fork!

“The shroud of the dark side has fallen, begun the clone war has.” – Yoda

Ted Patrick, Adobe’s Flex Evangelist opened his blog entry titled: M$ Silverlight vs. Adobe Flash Player: “Begun the clone war has…” with that quote and states:

The goal of Silverlight is to get into the game, not to add anything new of value. If you look at the feature set on a pure technology basis, Silverlight has 80% less features and 98% less compatibility than Adobe Flash Player.

Ted, a clear heavyweight within the Flex community even before he joined Adobe, outlines his list of why to NOT go the Silverlight route:

… 0% Market Penetration – Anyone choosing Silverlight for an application today should have their head examined. Every single end user is going to download and install a proprietary plug-in from Microsoft.

It will take years before market penetration is meaningful, my guess is that 2012 might be a decent year for Silverlight. It took Flash Player 4 releases to get 80% traction and 2 more to get into the 90% market penetration.

Microsoft will get to 50% using Windows Update(cough, anti-trust, cough) but the remaining 48% is going to be a near impossible climb.

My perspective is that, among many other Adobe Evangelist statements I’ve heard, I’m taking it with a grain of salt. Methinks thou dost protest too much. MSFT has many more methods to push Silverlight than just Windows Update and Ted’s been in the game long enough to know that.

What this statement does imply is that Adobe has a strategy they will attempt of forcing Microsoft to update both Silverlight and Flash within their browser. A valid question, because merely installing a new IE security update caused Flash sites globally to stop working overnight back in late 2004.

My thoughts: Adobe is going to have to manage a competitive strategy with the IE8 upgrade looming over the horizon, and it has to be better than asking everyone to convert to Firefox.

Ted also mentioned Microsoft’s record with security as a reason people should not upgrade. This seems clearly the pot calling the kettle black:

Security and Trust – One simple question here:
Would you install an animated software runtime from Microsoft when they can’t fill security holes in Animated Cursors in Windows?

Once again I have to seriously question if anyone rides herd over their Evangelists less than Adobe does because Ted posted this after the whole PDF Javascript security flaw was exposed and less than three months after this article was published detailing the PDF issue in the Washington Post.

Comments from other users point out a large range of opinion. One of the (anonymous) comments to Ted’s blog says this:

Microsoft is pretty good at the copycat game:
+ Unix –> DOS
+ Mac OS –> Windows
+ Netscape –> IE
+ QuickTime/Real –> Windows Media
+ WordPerfect/Visicalc –> Office
+ etc…
And they dominated market share with all those, leaving the originals in the dust.

So it’s understandable that Ted would be a bit grouchy.

Here’s a clear perspective stating a draw in the technology:

From Microsoft vs Adobe Smackdown – Silverlight and Adobe Media Player:

It seems to me that the ultimate winner in this battle will be the one to push the greatest number of users from one platform to another: from Windows to Silverlight, and from Flash to Adobe Media Player. Both companies seem to have a good shot at doing that, meaning that the ultimate victor is just too hard to call.

Windows Media Player clients are something that Adobe has tried for a long time to get. Those Media Player (MPS) clients just aren’t converting from Flash, and that’s something MSFT has long oWned, and something that Adobe seeks to obtain through their Flash user base.

I’m also expecting Windows Live products (I’m blogging on LiveWriter as we speak) to be used as portals for the Silverlight upgrade along with the IE browser upgrade and the ‘antitrust’ Windows Update.

Of course there’s more raw data to this post, but I’m truncating it for sanity’s sake…

Flex Talking Points

Summing up Ted Patrick, Adobe’s Flex Evangelist clipped from Justification request: Silverlight vs. Flex:

I can talk about the Flex side…
1. Flex is available today and works.

2. Flex 2 is viewable in 85+% of web browsers, Flex 2 SWF files run in Flash Player 9.

3. You can use any HTTP Server and any backend technology (.NET,JAVA,PHP,Ruby,CF, Python) with Flex via XML, SOAP, Sockets, ZLIB, Etc. 

4. Flex 2 has a mature and growing component set. There are lots of developers creating open source components for Flex and the source code for all components is available today in the Flex SDK. See: Flexbox, FlexLib, FlexComponents for details.

5. Flex does not integrate well with .NET on the backend. We are working on a great solution to make .NET integration seamless. Additionally strongly typed SOAP Web Services support coming in Flex 3 (very soon) including full support for .NET SOAP encodings.

6. Real-time data push with Binary Sockets using any TCP/IP Socket server. FTP/NNTP/SVN/POP/XMPP  Example: http://webmessenger.yahoo.com

7. Graphical and Programatic skinning with Illustrator/Flash/Photoshop/CSS

8. There are many large companies actively developing RIA’s with Flex, from JPMorgan/Chase to Yahoo to Google to many Web 2.0 start-ups.

9. If you develop using Flex or AJAX you can port your app to the desktop using Apollo. Apollo allows you to build desktop applications for WIN/LIN/OSX deployed as a single .AIR file cross-platform. One toolset for Web RIA and Desktop RIA development.

10. Flex has gone fully open source Mozilla Public License. All compilers and framework will be available for extension and embedding within the Flex 3 SDK. 

Plus all the minor video advantages that SL1.0 has will evaporate in weeks.

From Justification request: Silverlight vs. Flex found on the Silverlight Forums:

Now that microsoft is fixing the one advantage flash has had in cross browser embeding, any chance of Adobe catching up is about to evaporate. The Windows Media VC-1 standard is being used by more professional and enterprise entities than any other standard in the world.   

Flash does what it does and Silverlight is playing catch up to flash, but frankly MS is attacking a completely different problem in the end game… to think Adobe will ever have the enterprise scalability, DRM, Compression size, Bandwidth management, CDN support, HD quality, live broadcasting, developer api’s, hardware device accessibility (including STB’s, Mobile devices, XBox360′s, and HD-DVD players), is wishing for something that frankly the war is over on.  

Just ask Jeremy Allaire over at brightcove about why he’s supporting VC-1 and Silverlight as soon as he can? 

Ohh in case you forgot…  In 1995 Jeremy D. Allaire co-founded Allaire Corporation with his brother JJ Allaire, creating the web development tool Cold Fusion. When Macromedia acquired Allaire in March 2001, Jeremy became Chief Technology Officer. At Macromedia, Jeremy helped create the Macromedia MX (Flash) platform.

Again, from Justification request: Silverlight vs. Flex 

…So to answer your silverlight VS flex question, just use flex for 6-12 months, then move to silverlight and enjoy using Visual Studio and managed code again.

By that time all of the large control vendors will have complete control suites for WPF / Silverlight and I bet that silverlights penetration surpasses flash 9.0 by late 07 or early 08.  As many huge portal sites are already getting behind it.  

Silverlight Talking Points

Here’s one from the Microsoft Evangelist, pointing to the potential of regression away from Silverlight back to ASP.NET, AJAX, or bouncing ahead to WFP:

If one was to weigh up black and white approach to which direction one was to head, I’d look at it more from a direction of self-paced ROI. C# + XAML can get you open ended access inside the Microsoft product stack, ranging from IIS7.0 to Sharepoint through to Powershell, it’s your passport into many things.

This is important thing to note, as if you find that Silverlight (Great Experience) isn’t your cup of tea then you could always revert back to ASP.NET AJAX (Good Experience) or better yet upscale to WPF (Ultimate Experience). There is a degree of depth in which you can move in and out of the product stack. I should also point out that this is Version 1.0 and the level of complexity and degree of interoperability between our existing product offerings, one can only imagine what 2.0 and so on are going to be like.

And this one again from Justification request: Silverlight vs. Flex 

1. Resources – We have been evaluating Flex and attempting to find additional resources to address the development needs.  We have found that the learning curve is very steep and good resources are almost non-existent in our market place.  Those that claim to be Flex experts seem to only be a few pages ahead in the manual.  I had been evaluating SilverLight aka WPF/E for the last several months and when the execs came back from the Broadcaster’s meeting in Vegas they were singing about SilverLight and not Flex/Flash.  They quickly realized that our internal C# group could and have produced proof-of-concepts for justification for more research into SilverLight.

2. Video – Big for us. 

A. Creating a Flex/Flash video player is very simple.  Creating a SilverLight video player is even easier.  Both can do easy overlays and produce nice controls.  However, we found the video brush in SilverLight with Matrix calculations to be superior and simple to manipulate which caused the creative wheels to begin moving.

B. Codecs/Encoding.  This could be one of the biggest for us.  FLV (Flash Video Files (latest versions)) uses On2 proprietary format with very steep royalties [Sidebar: One thread mentioned BrightCove - Their client encoder uses On2's client APIs that encodes on the local machine before uploading to server and may cost 5 to 6 digit royalties.  A major reason.]  We understand that future versions of FLVs will be based on H.264 to hopefully address this very issue.  It’s current version makes it difficult to justify developing around this platform.  The server version of On2 is less expensive but more resource intensive creating another set of issues.  We can also leverage C++/C# encoding expertise in-house to produce VC-1/WMVs at higher quality.

C. Resource Intensive.  Our own analytics has shown that encoding for Windows Media is less stressful on our infrastucture than encoding FLVs. 

D. Full Screen.  This is a great feature.  The ability to manipulate the canvas without hindering the playback is huge as far as user experience goes.

I could continue but the point is ROI and quality of experience.  We have stopped our search (temporarily – hopefully for good) for Flex experts while we continue our evaluation.  Our results so far are proving that SilverLight could be a platform of choice moving forward.

Here’s a roundup done by Claus Topholt on his blog that recently had some excellent comments from both MSFT and ADBE Evangelists.

The thing is, Silverlight uses a declarative XML-based language called XAML and you code the entire thing in .NET. Yes, that means C# code which gets compiled and runs in a special, stripped down CLR inside the browser. Very cool.

…But it gets better: It not only works in Internet Explorer, it also works in Firefox and even Safari on Mac. And the Mono guys are hard at work on a Linux version called Moonlight, apparently with some support from Microsoft.

…Flex is based on MXML, which looks suspiciously like XAML – or is it the other way around? You write code in ActionScript 3 (AS3), which is a script-language that is based on ECMAScript. Now where have I heard about ECMAScript before? Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s Javascript. Damn.

…And let me tell you: The feature set is no joke, and neither is the community around the product. Practically anything you can think of, someone else have already wrestled with and solved in Flex a long time ago.

Because of this I don’t see Flex being displaced right away, but I do see developer trends dwindling for Flex in the future. Stay tuned, I’ll be covering this tech war as it unfolds!