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MIX076: The remix from day one

In the aftermath of MIX07 day one, with the announcements around Silverlight (see yesterday's ZDNet coverage from Mary Jo Foley, Ryan Stewart and myself), the blogosphere is weighing in with more coverage and analysis. Steve Gillmor has emerged from his cave to comment on the calculus of Microsoft's latest moves on the chess board:Today the Web woke up to a real story about itself.
Written by Dan Farber, Inactive

In the aftermath of MIX07 day one, with the announcements around Silverlight (see yesterday's ZDNet coverage from Mary Jo Foley, Ryan Stewart and myself), the blogosphere is weighing in with more coverage and analysis.

Steve Gillmor has emerged from his cave to comment on the calculus of Microsoft's latest moves on the chess board:

Today the Web woke up to a real story about itself. Microsoft has put forward a powerful challenge to the notion that Google will steamroller Windows once it’s done with Office. Scott Guthrie made a strong case for developer extension of the rich browser, and Ray Ozzie cracked open the tiniest ray of hope that Office apps could conspire with Silverlight to create lock-in around the new Web runtime.
In the absence of competition, this could have been a frightening moment for those who dread a return to Redmond control. The short-term losers are Sun (the Java runtime, hello) and perhaps Adobe on the tools side. The mid-term threatened certainly include Apple and Salesforce, where their versions of rich and reach depend on a level browser playing field. What happens if we start lusting for that extra oomph of a Silverlight UI on a video-based information service we’ve somehow gotten addicted to?

Nik Cubrilovic at TechCrunch summarizes the Silverlight announcements and concludes:

My personal opinion is that Silverlight is great and that Microsoft have done very well to bring .NET to the browser (almost all browsers). What will be interesting to follow will be designer adoption of Expression Studio (as Adobe is heavily entrenched here) and then consumer adoption of Silverlight. There is no doubt that it will take time for Silverlight to hit the browsers and it is up against Flash which is deeply entrenched - but the barrier to delivering a new plugin to browsers is nowhere near as high as most users will trust Microsoft as the publisher of the plugin and will install it. I also expect that Silverlight will get distribution through Windows Update and Microsoft’s own applications (hotmail?).

TechCrunch also has a podcast interview with Silverlight product manager Brian Goldfarb. 

Richard MacManus and several other bloggers had lunch with Microsoft's Ray Ozzie (chief software architect) and Scott Guthrie (general manager of developer platforms). Richard comments on the services stategy:

Also what we're seeing at MIX this year is that the end products are beginning to show evidence of Ozzie's strategic leadership - e.g. we saw today that Silverlight is a comprehensive web development platform covering the browser and desktop. I haven't mentioned Scott Guthrie much in this post (mainly because his job is to talk specifically to developers, in their language, so a lot of what he says goes over my head!). But the demos of Silverlight-produced apps this morning, which Guthrie compered, were impressive and show that the services strategy coming from Ozzie is starting to show through now in Microsoft's products.

Ryan Stewart was at the luncheon as well:

I asked about the inclusion of the Dynamic Language Runtime, something Scott announced during his part of the keynote and something that garnered a bit of attention. I asked Scott what strategic point of it was and whether or not their developer base had been clamoring for the ability to write Ruby against the CLR. The answer to the second was 'not really'. It's compelling for them, but wasn't a huge draw. The answer to the first was that Microsoft wants to bring as many people as possible into the CLR and give them the freedom to choose what language they want. That's a good story, and I'm curious to see what the end result. Evan Williams, the creator of Twitter, one of the most popular Ruby applications out there said it was going to be great for his team because they could build a Silverlight application on top of Twitter using the same skillset they used to build Twitter itself.

Update: Ryan Stewart explains how Microsoft benefits from the Rich Internet Application developer problem

Adobe has a better cross-platform developer story. As developers move to the Mac, Adobe gives them the tools to build RIAs. Microsoft's solution is 'run parallels' which is true, but doesn't pay heed to the fact that a lot of the influential developers don't want to. But in the short term, as more and more companies evaluate RIA technology, the cross-platform story isn't going to matter. They just need to be able to fill positions. That's one reason why I think Microsoft may see more success with Silverlight than people think. Technically, it's not better than Flash and if you know Flash, there isn't a compelling reason for you to learn Silverlight. But if you're a company who can't find Flash developers, and you're starting from scratch or upgrading from/adding on to Ajax, Silverlight will be a great solution with a big built in base.  

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