A discussion about the software industry and their coders

Microsoft Vista evangelist Tim Sneath has revealed Silverlight, a browser plug-in for playing rich media files (video, animation, interactivity) -- direct competitor of Adobe's Flash Player. Silverlight will be available for both Mac and Windows and on multiple browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.

Microsoft needs to be cross-platform and cross-browser to possibly compete with Flash Player, which enjoys 98% penetration on Internet enabled Desktops. Microsoft's Windows Media Player by comparison has a penetration of 83.2% justa few percentage points below 87.9% of Java. Thus Silverlight seems poised to reach high penetration levels by leveraging the distribution power of Windows and Internet Explorer.

  But the game is not about being altruistic or doing brand building by giving the world free Media Players. The real competition between Microsoft and Adobe is the revenue associated with selling Rich Media (Video, animation etc) and RIA (Rich Internet Applications) Authoring Tools. (Rich Internet Applications in short, are Web Applications that run in a web browser or media player like Flash Player and have a rich UI & responsiveness of Desktop Applications. An early white paper on RIAs by Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect of Adobe.) Adobe makes good money by selling Designers and Web Developers - Flash Authoring Tools. Adobe Flash CS 3 is sold to Designers and Adobe Flex Builder is the RIA IDE for Web Developers.

Almost all the Flash content we play using Flash Player is currently created using tools from Adobe. Popular Online Video sites like MySpace, YouTube, and Yahoo! Video are users of Flash Video. If Microsoft Silverlight displaces Flash all that money will go to Microsoft ofcourse! Content for Silverlight can be created by Web Developers using Microsoft Visual Studio, and by Web Designers by using the new Microsoft Expression Studio (free Beta download available from MSFT).

Since Visual Studio has been around for a while, I expect Developers to be the early developers of content for Silverlight. Microsoft Expression will take a long time to get any uptake from the Designer community. Thus the game initially should get played out like this: Adobe will keep its hold on the Designer community since Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Authoring are the key tools used for creating Flash Content. Microsoft will have a stronger chance winning over the Developers who are already used to Visual Studio. Akamai and NetFlix are amongst some key players that have announced support for Silverlight.

One key area for competition in the International Markets will be the level of Localization / Internationalization support by Silverlight. Even though Flash has been around for a long time, international languages support has been a weak link.

If Microsoft succeeds with Silverlight, it will hurt the Network Publishing Strategy of Adobe.