They saw the Silverlight, and saw that it was good

Robert Scoble is trying to build a reinvention myth around Microsoft's introduction of Silverlight, its new smart client platform. Not so fast, Scoble! It's not the Web that's rebooting, it's Microsoft. Silverlight is significant as the catalyst that finally allows Microsoft to recreate itself as a vendor for the Web era.

Microsoft's biggest challenge in adapting to the Web has never been a shortage of resources or innovation. The barriers to success are cultural: getting developers, product managers and partners to switch from a server-centric view of the world to a new mindset that works with the realities of the Web. A few weeks ago the struggle between these two viewpoints seemed almost dysfunctional: I called it Microsoft’s Jekyll-and-Live identity crisis. Now the good guys can just point to Silverlight, and suddenly everyone gets what the Web is all about.

It's just like Ray Ozzie said in an interview published last month in Knowledge@Wharton:

"Everyone can rally around something that works. But if it's telling everybody to rally around something that's still in the process of being defined, that causes combinatorial explosion in coordination costs."

Just to recap in case you missed it, Silverlight is a cross-browser plug-in (it executes in HTML and JavaScript) that includes core elements of .NET — including the common language runtime (CLR). It makes it possible to write rich-client, browser-based applications that easily rival anything written in AJAX and Flex, and the CLR support (coming later this year in version 1.1) means that developers can use any of their favorite Microsoft programming languages, plus several open-source alternatives — or just use the popular Visual Studio environment. That means anyone who knows how to develop applications for Windows now has the means to develop or adapt them for the Web, including mobile clients.

Now that Silverlight is here, Ray Ozzie (interviewed Monday by CNET's Martin LaMonica) has a clear and simple message for those developers:

"Look at the audience, where is the audience, and prioritize the development for Silverlight based on where the audience is ... the vast majority of applications that are today desktop apps or Web apps or rich Internet apps are all going to have some sort of component that is Web and client and mobile ... the vast majority of the commercial world and consumers — I personally believe will be these hybrid apps."

Silverlight lets Microsoft developers play in that world of hybrid applications — where previously the only major player with anything to offer was Adobe, as Ozzie acknowledged in the Wharton interview:

"If anybody has a software and services model, it's Adobe, because of that rich [Flash Player] applet that they extend the browser with. The more they enhance that, as you can see in their Flex and Apollo plans, the more it becomes this unified software and service vision, which is basically the same as Microsoft's vision."

Interestingly, now that Microsoft's vision has been revealed in the blinding flash that is Silverlight, Ozzie no longer sees Apollo in quite the same generous light, as ZDNet blogger Ryan Stewart discovered when he met him over lunch on Monday:

"There was some talk of Apollo, but as I said, Ray didn't quite seem to grasp that Apollo applications are really desktop experiences with the ties that he mentioned being important."

A month ago, Ozzie needed Apollo to illustrate what he wanted people to rally around. Now Silverlight fulfils that role. Ozzie spoke to Wharton last month at length about the opportunity to build applications in new ways as a result of the opening up of the Web 'cloud':

"[T]he fact that so many people have high bandwidth [lets] us figure out how to balance what part of an application should be in a data center — somewhere 'in the cloud' — and what piece of that solution should be on a desktop or on a mobile device. The right balance varies based on the application. But that balance is far different moving forward than it has been in the past ... first generation 'software as a service' really just meant browser. Second generation means weave together hardware, software and services to accomplish a specific solution."

Back then, Ozzie's rhetoric still couldn't convey the full nature of the transformation to those who weren't already on the same wavelength. The value of Silverlight is that people can now see in practical terms what he's talking about, and how it will help bring the applications they work with today more fully into the Web environment without having to throw away everything they've already invested in the Windows platform.

It's not a reinvention or even less a "reboot" of the Web, because the Web has been evolving in that direction anyhow, with or without Microsoft. The breakthrough that Silverlight achieves is that it reinvents the way Microsoft developers think about the Web.