Developers Eye Microsoft's Silverlight As Potential Flash Alternative

The Redmond, Wash., software giant is lining up some heavy-hitting early adopters, including CBS, Netflix and MLB.com, all of which plan to use Silverlight for some of their streaming video.

"If you get the right 12 sites on the Internet to use it, you will have 95 percent installation covered within a year," Guthrie said at his TechEd session.

Thanks to Silverlight's catchy name and strong word-of-mouth buzz from Mix07, the fledgling technology already has high awareness in the leading-edge Microsoft development community.

Dave Noderer, a Microsoft MVP and CEO of .Net services firm Computer Ways in Deerfield Beach, Fla., is kicking Silverlight's tires and looking to use it for a monitoring application he's upgrading for a call center client. The current version of the application is text-only, and Noderer isn't interested in plowing through a complicated Flash or JavaScript development process to improve the application's interface.

But Silverlight so far has proved to be easy to use and relatively free of glitches, Noderer said. Once Microsoft releases Silverlight 1.1 -- now in alpha and the first version that will include Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) -- he expects development to really take off.

"We'll definitely be tempted to put more graphics into our projects," Noderer said.

Application developers that have already invested in Flash are eyeing Silverlight and beginning to consider whether to migrate. Bamboo Solutions, a Reston, Va., developer, offers a number of SharePoint add-ons, several of which incorporate Flash. After Mix07, one of its engineers began testing Silverlight and is exploring what it has to offer, Bamboo Solutions Engineering Manager Wes Bryan said. The Microsoft-centric ISV is open to the idea of switching over.

But screen-capture and recording applications maker TechSmith, another exhibitor at TechEd's Partner Expo, is less inclined to move away from the venerable Flash.

"Right now, it's Flash that's the de facto standard," said Ron Scott, a TechSmith technical sales engineer. "A lot of our customers don't want you to put all these plug-ins and players on their servers."

Microsoft's challenge to Flash's dominance will begin in earnest when it ships Silverlight's first official release this summer. If the company's efforts to recruit top-tier content partners pays off and Guthrie's bullish prediction about end-user adoption pans out, the Web multimedia technology and tools market could look very different in a year.

On the other hand, Microsoft may have to be patient and wait a bit longer for Silverlight to achieve mass adoption. After all, it has a checkered history with new technology launches -- and partners have long memories.

"We know Microsoft. We usually wait until the 2.0 product comes out," DST Systems' Jurgensen said.