Some minor issues

Last week I attended the Microsoft Mix07 conference in Las Vegas. It was on the kind invitation of Microsoft. Meaning I was able to go for a very discounted price (we had to pay about 1/3th).

Mix was overwhelming. It was in the mythical city Las Vegas, in an A-class hotel (the Venetian). Everything was big and looking good.
Ray Ozzie’s keynote was very energetic and inspiring. The sessions where most of the time ok (I’m not gonna report on them, I can’t add value, just use Technorati) and networking went smooth.

From a marketing point of view this was excellent execution. About 10 of Belgium’s most creative interactive agencies were invited/present (I think I can say this, apart from These Days were present: i-merge, Duval Guillaume E, Atmosphere, One Agency, Emakina, the Reference, RTL and Ordina). So a bunch of opinion leaders. If you can convince them to at least listen to what you have to say, and treat them nicely, they might consider using your product, they might talk about it, and anyway they know you exist.
So this is what happened, it all went flawless. We went home excited. Made some new friends. Had a great time. Geert is an excellent Trade Manager!

Everybody from our little group is probably facing the same challenge: passing the fire. After all we’re all just back from a very exited and luxury Microsoft trip, so we have to be brainwashed. The truth is somewhat different in my mind

What we saw in Vegas (Silverlight), and what you all can see on the web now (if you’re interested) is a new excited technology. It’s not new in concept, and on a high level view not new on possibilities. Indeed, most of what’s there to see can be done in some other technology, like flash and flex. So what’s the buzz?

In my opinion there are 3 main reasons to take this technology serious.

1/ The focus on design and experience. Microsoft now understands it’s not only technology that’s making the difference. Technology is needed in the deep core of any application and it’s extremely important to get this right. But it’s design and experience that are making the difference. MS kind of admit they ignored this in the past, but are now ready to made up this mistake.
I know companies like Adobe are focusing on design/experience/creativity since ever. They absolutely have an advantage here. But the fact that MS acknowledges this now means a lot to me. It means they can grow in this area, but it also means they used this as a presumption in building their software. If they hadn’t done so, Silverlight would be useless.

2/ Silverlight brings a lot of developers in the multimedia game. Not that much people question .net/C# when it’s about building standalone programs or back-ends. It’s just not that suitable to do rich front-ends at this point. With Silverlight it’s a whole new ballgame. Non multimedia (as in flash/flex/..) developers will be able to build rich internet applications as well. At first (the current beta) the supported languages are html and JavaScript, but soon other languages will be added: c#, python, even Ruby. New multimedia developers can stick to the language they master. A lot of potential developers are entering the market. And this is a good thing in en era of scarcity.

3/ The workflow. Microsoft’s starting point was the division between designers and programmers. Let designers design and programmers develop. So everything is build round this workflow. The new tools (expression studio) take care of this. However, as a designer you don’t need to use these tools. You can stick to Photoshop if you wish (luckily). At the end the design just needs to be converted to XAML (with a provided tool), so developers can do their things.
If anything goes wrong in multimedia production, it’s about workflow and scoping. The expectations are just not the same at client <-> design <-> develop side. This is funny since it doesn’t seem that big of a problem on classical application development. By bringing this classical application development to the web we actually might learn from this, and in the end create better products, with a better expectation level, and thus create more value for money.

At this point, please don’t panic. Only the beta version has been launched, so a lot need to evolve. And only time can learn what the impact will be. But in my mind, Silverlight is something we need a close eye on (I’m looking for developers, call me).
It’s not a replacement for Adobe technology. I love Adobe, I want them to keep doing their things. But it’s a new technology in the rich internet spectrum, and as so called innovators we can only cheer for that. In the end we probably have to decide what project for what technology, but the choice will be more funded. As I said before, I think it’s also great Adobe found a new challenger. It will definitely keep their products evolving and getting better. Concerning this latter (Adobe <-> MS) I can recommend a post by Scott Barnes. He’s a former Adobe employee working for MS now, and has some interesting insights.
If you have serious doubts about Silverlight, I suggest you to wait and see. It might turn out you’ll be right or not. I don’t like guessing about figures impossible to predict. Not at this stage, the early beta. And I don’t like the MS bashing thing either. Seems cool again.. Reminds me of the Linux newsgroups back in 1999 were your respect seemed to grow for every MS flame you started (might be still so). I just don’t think of it as pretty constructive, so it’s a waste of my time reading it. If you don’t believe in it just say so, keep quit and triumph if you turn out right