Is Microsoft up to old tricks with Silverlight?

Yes. Of course.

Whenever the question is, "Is Microsoft trying to make use of their existing dangerously strong positions in order to strengthen their positions in new areas?" The answer is always, "Yes."

In this case, however, I just kinda have to chuckle, because it's a battle between two companies who have always been pretty uncomfortable playing on the level playing field of the Internet. Open standards are not the forte of Microsoft or Adobe, and I don't think I'd lose much sleep over either one of them taking a bit of a beating. If they want to beat each other up, that's even better.

But, I guess if I had to choose between Microsoft and Adobe which one I wanted to be in control of my online video and multimedia experience, I would choose Adobe. They've been Linux friendly, by some definition of friendly, for at least a few years...though it's always seemed pretty grudging. And Flash Player aint exactly the pinnacle of software reliability (though it seems to be better lately...and to be fair, I suppose they could be as nasty and evil as RealPlayer and try to do stupidly irritating stuff to my preferences every time it fires up...but then, I guess if they'd been doing that, they'd be in the same ghetto as RealPlayer).

What are, for me as a user, and for "rich media content" developers, the advantages of Silverlight over Flash?

Programming languages (just stick to interpreted, 'web' languages for this example), all do practically the same thing, but they all exist for a simple reason like a developers preference. Is this the same with media content such as silverlight and flash, or is it simply Microsoft trying to become the top dog for online media?

I'm all in for competitors, maybe Silverlight wont suck most of my Macs CPU up when playing online video, and Adobe might work harder to make things more efficient and better for developers, but if this is just MS trying to take over my browser as they loose IE market share, I will be disappointed.

Personally, I'm all for MS bundling Silverlight with Windows. The difference between this and the IE/Netscape debacle is that the internet browser decision is a choice made by the user, and by bundling IE with Windows, MS essentially made the choice for 90% of its non-tech-savvy users who didn't know they could download a different browser. (Not to mention, I seem to recall IE was actually a better browser than Netscape. despite its awfulness today).

By bundling Silverlight with Windows, they are contributing towards making the technology a standard, allowing developers to make the choice to write Silverlight apps rather than Flash apps without having to worry about how many of their users have it installed / will install it. There will never be more computers with Silverlight installed than Flash, unless Adobe makes some huge mistakes, but by trying to make the numbers more equal, MS is giving developers the power to write apps for the technology which best fits their needs. Whether or not Silverlight is that technology for a majority of developers remains to be seen.

If they used flash, this story would seem ridiculous: --

Adobe will offer U.S. Web surfers this month thousands of hours of free video direct from the Olympics in Beijing.

The service, produced in conjunction with NBC, is being hailed as a bold experiment in delivering on the original promise of the Web. For the first time, it will be possible to watch specific events on demand as well as many of the less popular sporting events, which have received scant attention in mainstream television coverage of the games.

But there's a catch. To view the video, it will be necessary to download a Adobe Web browser software component based on a new proprietary technology, Flash, that is intended to make it possible to display interactive animations, graphics, audio and video, all within a fixed window inside a Web browser display.

Flash will work for both Macintosh and Windows PC users, and a version for Linux is also available. A mobile version will be available on Windows Mobile and Nokia smartphones.

Flash now has a monopoly on "rich" content for the browser. I think a second player in the field is a good thing.

And since Adobe is proprietary too, it's no big loss. Silverlight might become a -good- proprietary multimedia plugin.

As flash is THE standard, i've been forced to use it for 3 versions, i still hate it and still have a hard time figuring out. When Expression Blend beta came out, it only took me 2 days to figure out. I can do animations in blend in about 2 hours what it would take days in flash. Silverlight also scales so much better than flash, i mean flash starts to die after you get past VGA pixel sizes. That's just sad. Silverlight scales literally to gigapixels. If you haven't been to photosynth, check out has friggin fast it is.