Ted Patrick on Silverlight 1.0

5 09 2007

Ted Patrick, Flex Evangelist at Adobe, blogged a reaction to Microsoft releasing Silverlight 1.0. Interesting to note is that he acknowledges that Microsoft has forced Adobe to speed up on its plans for Flash Player features and focus on creating wide adoption.

Here are a few quotes from his post that stood out for me:

“SilverLight forced Adobe to speed up existing plans and focus on broad adoption while adding great developer features in the runtime…”

“Customer feedback (#1) and competitive pressure (#2) were driving factors in creating “MovieStar” and pushing our H.264 adoption plans forward with full 720/1080p hardware scaling support. When “MovieStar” ships in the next few months, yes in 2007, it will support millions of existing H.264 video content by default without special streaming solutions or proprietary video codecs like Microsoft’s VC1.”

The latest Flash Player adoption rates show a very positive trend with a worldwide adoption of around 90% of web-enabled desktop computers. In terms of multimedia experience there is no doubt that the Adobe Flash platform is currently the clear winner but Microsoft does have a compelling story for developers coming from a .NET environment.

Microsoft does have the ability to force wide adoption through the Windows update mechanism, likely packaging it in with a critical security patch (or is that just me being cynical). I have complete faith Adobe will see us through and use the emerging competition as a launching pad for more innovation. It looks like we’ll get more of an insight in where things are headed at the MAX conference.

“When “MovieStar” ships in the next few months, yes in 2007, it will support millions of existing H.264 video content by default without special streaming solutions or proprietary video codecs like Microsoft’s VC1…”