Microsoft announced today that the final release of Silverlight 2 will be made available Tuesday Oct 14. The company gloats about 25% penetration, but take a look at Microsoft’s promoted partners and try to find one that Microsoft didn’t pay to try it out. It’s worth asking the question - is this too little too late?

In a Customer Evidence and Quote sheet put together by Microsoft PR, they lead with NBC’s universally underwhelming Silverlight powered olympics player - not bad, but what’s next? MLB, Microsoft’s largest initial partner which praised its rich capabilities is notably missing from the testimonials list, having trimmed back Silverlight use on much of their site after initially jumping in.

The other partners listed (CBS Collegs Sports, Blockbuster, France Television, Hard Rock Cafe International) seem more satisfied with Silverlight as an acceptible next step based on their pre-existing Windows Media workflow rather than a next generation platform capable of greater interaction and richer user experience.

Until developers create something really different using Silverlight and make it work better than Flash, there’s not much advantage to Silverlight. Hoping to make Silverlight more developer friendly, Microsoft announced plans to create an open source development environment, funding Soyatech to create an Eclipse plugin that will provide greater interoperability between Silverlight and Java, but that’s not slated for release until Spring 2009.

Hopefully by then Microsoft can find some partners willing to build rich applications with Silverlight, without Microsoft fronting cash to build them. Otherwise, they might as well just forget this whole thing.

Tags: Adobe, Flash, microsoft, Silverlight 2

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.