I have seen the Silverlight…
So TechMeme is chock full of news about SilverLight, including the patented Microsoft astro-turf announcement technique, where all the Microsoft WPF/Expression employees post the same links to their blog without actually saying anything new and substantive. The best post is the real announcement from Tim Sneath. The other post worth reading is this one from Loke Uei where he has a handy comparison chart listing Silverlight vs. WPF vs. Flash/Flex. Too bad the column on the Flash/Flex stuff is almost completely incorrect. Every other post from Microsoft’s folks is pretty much worthless.
But what did they actually annnounce at NAB? A decent new name (by Microsoft standards it is excellent since it only has one compound word) and a really boring new logo. The runtime downloads have been renamed but the bits themselves are the same pre-alpha stuff from a couple of months ago. No news on actual Expression support for Silverlight either. Some teasing about the miniCLR “surprise feature”. Guess they want to save all the real news for MIX. All that’s left for NAB is hype, hype, hype. The wow is back!
Meanwhile Apple and Adobe actually had new never-before-seen products to talk about, not just new product names.
Shebanator 
I sort of agree with you that the hype meter for Silverlight is off the charts. It’ll be a lot more newsworthy when they release the first version in final form. But it must kind of bug Adobe to have the Flash Player and Adobe CS announcements drowned out… Such is the nature of hype.
[Andrew says] Well, NAB is always a PR-fest. I suspect we announced CS3 a couple of weeks ago to get ahead of the cycle.
“including the patented Microsoft astro-turf announcement technique, where all the Microsoft WPF/Expression employees post the same links to their blog without actually saying anything new and substantive.”
They’ve got a patent on that? Shoot….
(I’m ticked about how they’re trying to muddy the Rich Internet Application story… five years later they pick up on RIAs, announce a “new generation” of something, and say “We think RIA should mean ‘Rich Interactive Application’ instead.” I feel like dropkicking some of these clowns off a roof somewhere….)
Today they announced a name, we announced a name. Meanwhile CS3 is actually shipping, and 85% of the world’s machines are Flex2-capable. I can put up with it. 😉
jd/adobe
Does this mean in a months time I can do a jd post on why Adobe aren’t talking abou SilverLight?
heh
Nice approach and rallying the troops not to be distracted by the new branding version 1.0 of our new product. I’m sure we’ll mix it up from here on out but all in good fun eh?
–
Scott Barnes
SilverLight Evangelist
Microsoft.
The reason everyone blogs about it is that
(a) They’re all excited about something they’re worked on or heard about (in my case) finally shipping
(b) Needing something to link to, the official docs/press release/site comes in handy
Are you really telling me that a bunch of Adobe employees are not linking to the CS3 page today? Aren’t you being a bit unfair here?
[Andrew says] No, I don’t think I’m being unfair. Go to http://blogs.adobe.com/ and look at the global feed. I only saw one “CS3 is shipping post” there. Meanwhile, I saw 20 or so posts from Microsoft employees whose blog posts basically said “We’ve renamed ourselves to Silverlight, check out this post.” That is astro-turfing as far as I’m concerned.
silverlight? logo is blue. they need better ux guys.
cross platform my ass. will we ever see a linux silverlight runtime?
I could go further about how Kevin did an annoucement about Apollo in MAX 2005 and especially how MXNA went nuts over it. (Same exact concept, no competitor at the time – now there is and you cry foul?).
But that would be childish and overall, you’re more inclined to downplay SilverLight for obvious reasons.
Respectfully disagree with your opinions and think they are a bit narrowminded.
[Andrew says] I didn’t say one peep about what non-Microsoft employees wrote about Silverlight, so the two situations aren’t at all analogous. But nice try.