I have just finnished writing a paper titled “Flash Vs Silverlight: A usability evaluation” It is available here:

http://www.jamesmallorie.com/flashvssilverlight.html

Abstract:

This project explores specific usability issues relating to the Adobe Flash® Player and the Microsoft® Silverlight™ Player in the adoption of Rich Internet Applications. A critical usability research study was undertaken to formulate an evaluation framework. The findings of which, formed the basis of several structured experiments. The Adobe Flash Player and the Microsoft Silverlight Player were systematically tested against the framework, resulting in a thorough and comparative evaluation of current and future usability issues.

Let me know what you think, what would you have done differently?

Success for MS can come in several forms. Whether it’s by popularity, quantity, or simply a choice of you being able to ‘choose’ silverlight or flash (which would be the only two leading technologies in that space).

Who started this misleading concept that MS ‘must’ be number one? It simply wants to give you something (in their own opinion) that’s better. There’s nothing there that says it will remove flash. So even if flash still remains number one, number two will still be MS and anything else in that space won’t matter…So they still come out on top.

Eventually over time they silverlight will become a namesake just as .NET has become.

Either they will make a dent. With windows being the desktop of choice for “most”; eventually it will be a ‘feature’ that will be part of the update stream that will be included.

I’ve played with development for silverlight, and I can honestly say from a technological perspective…Flash has a long way to go before what silverlight can do in BETA.

Nuph said.

What this is about to me is how people working with Microsoft IDE’s and servers will now be able to use the power of their systems to create RIA’s.
I have been working in this business for a very long time, and I work with a lot of different tools.
Visual Studio is hands down the best development environment. The Flash IDE is made by designers I think, and most of the time the designer is the same guy that is writing the code… the Flash IDE is a creative tool.
That’s fine, but it doesn’t scale … hence, altho Macromedia tried hard for a long time, there is zero Flash adoption where serious applications are concerned.
Silverlight is very different. It builds on top of Visual Studio (or it will completely once they get the C# runtime in there), the creative element to it boils down to a few XML files that can be editted seperately without even knowing what the underlying code does.

Then where streaming is concerned … Flash video is cool, Flash server solutions are immature compared to MS’ Windows Media server. The only way you can get Flash video to scale up in a cost effective way is by using progressive downloads and not stream at all. That in itself scales very badly cos there is no way of managing the bandwidth … progressive downloads are way less efficient than actual streams.
This is where Windows Media comes in … Windows Media is cheap, it scales to millions of concurrent users and it is very powerful in the sense that the server itself has an extensive object model that you can code against with your favorite .NET language. Silverlight unlocks all that power for every platform it (will) run(s) on.

What I’m saying is this … it’s a big mistake to look at Silverlight as just some new rasterization engine … or to compare it to Flash feature per feature. It is not Flash … it is something that allows Flash like experiences in top of an extremely powerful set of development tools and server solutions.
I use Flash as little as I can, simply because it is nightmarish to maintain. I simply cannot use it for critical functionality. And if you look around the web, you’ll notice I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Silverlight on the other hand I expect to be using as much as HTML, and I expect to be using it even for critical applications. It’s maintainable, plugs right into a professional development environment (Source Safe etc), has killer debug tools etc etc.

Flash has a light feel to it, is easy to develop in, can be pushed out to anything with a display (Silverlight on the Wii, I think not), is flexible enough to accomplish anything most folks will throw at it, and it’s finally starting to grow up. Silverlight was just born. Good luck Microsoft:)

Yesterday Alec Saunders’ “Silverlight vs. Flash: the battle for the platform” was where I first learned that Microsoft was officially releasing “Silverlight”, the product previously known as “Windows Presentation Framework/Everywhere (WPF/E)” (a…

From my POV, as a consumer, that’s a terrible experience.

From a strategy perspective, locking content to a particular format and player makes sense. So, each manufacturer persists in this customer unfriendly behaviour.

jd/adobe