GapingVoid asks on Twitter “Can anyone tell me, in 140 characters or less, what is “THE BIG IDEA” behind MSFT Silverlight?”
Pretty good question I thought. What’s the big idea behind a company like Microsoft, who’s not really well known in the creative/desktop-publishing space, stepping into the highly competitive market of computer animation. A market where Adobe (formerly Macromedia) have been building a huge market share and “fan club” for a bit more than a decade.
Well, Microsoft is definitely a little bit better than Adobe at the programming side of things. And given their success with .net it is safe to assume there’s a huge framework ready to be tapped into by Silverlight. More importantly though, Silverlight is most likely going to be a huge asset to the millions of aesthetically-challenged Windows developers. Its provision of basic UI components that conform to basic interface and usability guidelines will up the standard of developers’ output and also make it several orders of magnitude easier for them to interact with designers since a lot of the presentation is abstracted out of the code itself.
Therefore, my answer to GapindVoid’s question was “Silverlight is Flash for MSFT Developers: Lets geeks make beautiful stuff and interact better with designers”
What do you think? Will Silverlight beat Adobe at the browser-animation game?
Richard Muscat 
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“aesthetically-challenged Windows developers” + “Silverlight” ≠“beautiful stuff”.
You need more than changing the tool to raise esthetics.
However, it sounds like Silverlight might be very interesting for video playback.
rather optimistic statement i know… “not-so-crappy-stuff” might be more realistic.
still, i’ve seen a few not-as-mediocre-as-expected apps by win developers using this tool, so maybe something good might come out of it :-)
It’d be rather overoptimistic to assume they’d “beat” them. But there’s place for more than one player in that market, and Silverlight opens that area for a lot of developers who couldn’t enter it beofre. So in whole, it makes the whole momentum behind RIAs stronger.