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"So a whole lot of people thought Microsoft\u2019s Silverlight technology warranted an install to watch the summer games in Beijing at NBCOlympics.com. And another big crowd felt different, thinking, among other things, that the use of Adobe Flash would naturally suit them just as well.\nFollowing the main events in China (the Paralympics opened today), the limit of Microsoft\u2019s exclusivity deal with NBC was made clear this past week when NBC broadcast live coverage of the NFL\u2019s opening game between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins in celebratory preparation to do the very same for games occurring every Sunday night for duration of the next 17 weeks - and all in Flash. NFL.com, too, displayed Thursday\u2019s game and will routinely cover Sunday matches here on in.\nThe no-show-Silverlight talk doesn\u2019t end there. Suzanne Tindal of CNET\u2019s Webware quoted Microsoft senior program manager by the name of Scott Hanselman as having said at the company\u2019s own Tech.Ed conference that \u201Cwe\u2019re going to see a 100- to 1,000-fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla...kick us in the arse.\u201D Furthermore, Jonas Folles\u00F8 of Cap Gemini, an IT and business consultancy, commented that JavaScript will pose a serious challenge to Silverlight - more so than Flash has thus far.\n\nAn interesting position for Silverlight to find itself in, for sure. As it is basically known, Silverlight is a platform for developing rich Internet applications. More so with the 2.0 beta than with versions to come before, given its support for .NET and so forth. Therefore, juxtapositions with both Flash and JavaScript are rightfully made. Which means that if Silverlight is to have any chance at the kind of ubiquity shown by its more common competitors, it needs to do far more than solidify video delivery partnerships with the likes of NBC. It must inhabit a vast supply of Web applications of all types. Which, to speak reasonably here, isn\u2019t so inevitable. Years of assimilation among Web users needs to happen to achieve an all-around permanence. Flash and JavaScript developers know this. Unfortunately for Microsoft, those forces didn\u2019t have monsters of such dimensions to spar with.\nIt\u2019s not an impossibility for Silverlight to grow, mind you. Given the right level of attention to the platform, Microsoft could mark its Olympic foray as only the first big starter in the long slog toward mass adoption. But \u201Ccould\u201D is the key word. The hill climbs (yes, climbs plural) will be trying. One, as I noted above, is to convince the public of its validity and utility in the presence of two semi-household names. There's a toughie."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/09/06/fate-of-silverlight/>