MS shines Silverlight into thin AIR (and kicks 'beaten up' Google Gears)
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We say 'Hah!' to your puny desktop experience At the Mix07 conference in London last week, Scott Guthrie, co-inventor of ASP.NET and Microsoft's general manager for the technology, presented the latest plans for ASP.NET and Silverlight and took a swipe at the competition in the process.â¦
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Microsoft flexes its parody muscles with another in-house lampoon. In Gear Factor.
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Blog: Mono project head Miguel De Icaza to demo an alpha of Silverlight running on Linux at Mix conference later this week.
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Software maker heads to LA to show off a host of gadgets that use one or another Microsoft technology to access movies, music and video.
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Every good general knows that even the biggest army is useless if you can&#39;t get it on the battlefield.Microsoft and Adobe will both experience a version of this dilemma in 2008, as they wrangle for market and mind share in the burgeoning RIA (rich Internet application) space, according to close observers of the companies.&quot;They both have their own power positions,&quot; said Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond, citing Flash&#39;s installed base, which has been pegged in the 90 percent range.&quot;The one place that Microsoft holds a wild card is with developers. There still are not that many&#160;Flex&#160;developers out there,&quot; Hammond added, referring to Adobe&#39;s toolset for RIA applications. The company is also&#160;developing the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which lets Web developers build RIAs that can run on the desktop.Of course, Microsoft&#39;s worldwide legions of programmers don&#39;t pose a great advantage if not enough users install&#160;Silverlight, its cross-platform browser plug-in for RIA applications.&quot;They need to get Silverlight on 70 to 80 percent of the Internet-connected machines,&quot; said Greg DeMichillie, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft.One of the quickest ways to do that would be to ship the next version of Internet Explorer with Silverlight already embedded. But Hammond said this is unlikely, because doing so would likely prompt cries of outrage from competitors and perhaps antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft.Microsoft has instead has tried to seed usage of Silverlight through other tactics, such as getting high-traffic Web sites like NBA.com to use it. That in turn compels site visitors to install the plug-in.Silverlight 1.0 focuses largely on streaming media and therefore has more relevance for consumer-facing projects than enterprise IT shops.That all changes with the next version, which is expected in beta form early next year. &quot;Silverlight 2.0 is where it gets interesting,&quot; Hammond said.The next release includes a subset of Microsoft&#39;s .Net Framework, meaning the company&#39;s vast base of developers can program against it using familiar .Net languages as well as tools like Visual Studio.The company has also aimed at Adobe&#39;s sweet spot -- graphic design applications -- with its Expression line of products.Adobe, on the other hand, may not have an adoption problem for its plug-in, and already has won the hearts and minds of graphic designers everywhere, but is not nearly as strong in tools as Microsoft.&quot;The biggest thing Adobe needs to bring FlexBuilder up to date with modern developer tools,&quot; said DeMichillie. &quot;I would say they are two years behind Visual Studio.&quot;&quot;The other thing not to underestimate is the value of Microsoft&#39;s programming languages,&quot; he added. &quot;C# and VB -- they are real programming languages,&quot; he said. &quot;[Adobe&#39;s] ActionScript has certainly grown up in the last year or two, but you won&#39;t find people building industrial-strength applications with it.&quot;While a wealth of smaller companies and startups have crowded the RIA platform space, DeMichillie said he expects only Adobe and Microsoft will emerge as true players.&quot;When you build a platform you need so many pieces,&quot; he said. &quot;The other player trying to do this is Sun [with its JavaFX platform], but I don&#39;t think they have all the pieces.&quot;Hammond is somewhat more conservative. He also sees Adobe and Microsoft as the eventual leaders, but joined by between five and 10 smaller RIA vendors.For all the gamesmanship that is sure to unfold between Microsoft and Adobe in 2008, there is an overarching issue the firms must overcome, DeMichillie said: Convincing corporate developers that user interface development is just as important as the mainline systems that power their organization&#39;s core business processes.&quot;Their biggest problem is the backlog of applications they&#39;ve got to build,&quot; DeMichillie said.
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A few days after Microsoft released its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in, Adobe Systems has begun to disclose new features in its upcoming Flash Media Server 3. Many observers see Silverlight as being positioned as a major competitor to Flash and Adobe&#39;s other media technologies.
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For those who remember the browser wars, Microsoft seems to be missing in action from the latest battle. In recent months, upstart browsers such as Firefox and Opera have lured more than 10 million users away
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Microsoft Corp's   Silverlight Web video players will be rolled out on a number of  Web sites on Wednesday, including celebrity news destination  "Entertainment Tonight," in a sign of the growing rivalry  between the software giant and Adobe Systems Inc. .
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The arrival of February has brought with it a new Community Technology Preview of WPF/E, which has frequently been referred to as a Flash competitor, but has more to do with blending Windows applications with the Web.
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Look out, Google: the Redmond giant will make its long-awaited big splash into the search engine market tomorrow. The moment of truth has arrived.
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Last night at midnight, Microsoft put its latest successor on sale.
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Zawodny  threads off of Scoble  on the IE issue:  "I have to say, when I first read that I nearly fell off my chair laughing. I was thinking "how stupid ARE these IE guys?!?!?!" But we all know that Microsoft is full of smart people who care about what they're doing. So something really doesn't compute here."  "Last time I checked, IE wasn't even close to feature parity with Mozilla's browsers. No popup blocking, no tabbed browsing, etc."  "Does the IE team really not know what their product is missing?"  Perhaps.  It's highly likely that they just don't know.  The bigger issue here is that Microsoft products can't fail and they can't succeed.  Microsoft has 40-50 billion in the bank.  There ...
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InfoWorld - Developers of Moonlight, a Linux client version of Microsoft&#39;s new Silverlight multimedia technology, are closing in on feature-completeness, a leader of the project said on Monday.
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Microsoft France asked the head of the Mono project at Novell to demonstrate Silverlight running on Linux.
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Redmond unveils its much-hyped search engine. Does the world change?
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Vista tops list of tech disappointments... NYT and Henry Blodget weigh in on Google's threat to Microsoft... More people are 'Googling' themselves and more...
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Microsoft's ReMix07 event touted the benefits of its Silverlight rich media technology.