MIX08 keynote rundown

I was at the Microsoft MIX08 keynote today and Microsoft unveiled a few really cool things and a few not so much things. Obviously I work for Adobe so all the standard disclaimers apply.

First things first, lots of new bits. They dropped versions of Silverlight 2 Beta, Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio 2 Beta and hooks for Silverlight and Visual Studio. Silverlight penetration is coming along at a rate of 1.5 million downloads a day and growing. That should get them to their number of 200 million downloads by June of this year. Flash has about 12 million downloads a day for comparison but I think that's a very good number for Microsoft. No big news but some fun stuff to play with. Now on to the announcements.

A lot of the demos were things that we'd seen or heard of before like the Olympics site in Silverlight but there were a few gems that I think flew under the radar of some people. One is the adaptive streaming bit with Silverlight. In my opinion that was one of the coolest features of the day. I know that the Ooyala team has something like it in their video player. Adaptive streaming lets you provide the best experience to the user based on their system. If the bandwidth is slow and/or the machine isn't up to speed, the stream automatically adjusts the experience so the user gets the highest watchable quality possible. This was one of the things that has made Move Networks so successful. That was the biggest surprise for me - the announcement of a partnership with Move and Microsoft around Silverlight. I don't have any details of what the partnership looks like but that could be a big deal.

The coolest demo of the day was a deep zooming feature that was used on the Hard Rock Site. Microsoft has features in their tools that will let you stitch together a bunch of images and then a component that displays them so you can use the mouse wheel to get insane levels of detail on the stitched-together image. Pretty neat stuff. The rest of the demos were kind of blah. The AOL Mail application was good looking after they switched the skin to the Halo version but they showed things like "sorting a grid control" which is doable in Ajax. Even as a big Flash guy I wasn't sure that using Silverlight on that application was a great showcase of the technology. They did do a fun/cool demo of WPF and Cirque Du Soleil

The other big news was the fact that Silverlight mobile will be released on Nokia devices. The showed a couple of demos (one good, one bad) of Silverlight applications running on a S60 device. It sounds really cool and the way I understood it you could take the same Silverlight code and run it on the phone or browser. Two big questions were when will it be available and what is the licensing model. It seems like Microsoft is trying to get Silverlight mobile deployed in a number of places so I would imagine they'll make licensing as easy as possible.

Overall the keynote was good but not spectacular. Ray Ozzie talked a lot about "meshes" and how the ecosystem fits together. There were some very cool technical things with Silverlight but not a lot of examples to differentiate it with Flash. I was also hoping to see more about the workflow. At this point you can pretty much do anything you want to with Flash or Silverlight so what matters most in my mind is the tools. Blend got a few mentions but they were small bits and I would have liked to know more about their designer/developer story. They did show a "dev-igner" slide so that was cool. Maybe I need to go to the sessions to learn more.

Overall, even as an Adobe employee, I was hoping to see them push the boundaries and provide a 'check' to Adobe in the chess game. There was some of it, like the Silverlight mobile bit and adaptive streaming, but I was hoping for more tool innovation and more info about Silverlight 2 that we hadn't heard about. But the crowd was energetic and it's clear there's a ton of RIA interest in the .NET world so we should see some great apps down the road.