JD on EP

Update: I really am looking for link/pullquote resources here, rather than personal essays... I've already regretfully pulled some contents which get into the style of back-and-forth already taking place at the blogs of Ted, Ryan, or Slashdot. I'm looking to distill the news here, thanks.

"[Microsoft staffer Jesse] Liberty, for his part, diplomatically avoids controversy by focusing on Silverlight will do for developers: 'Because Silverlight is built from and into the .NET framework, all the work on .NET security and robustness and memory management are cooked into Silverlight from the beginning. There's a huge advantage of security and robustness in the applications you deliver -- and if you deliver apps over the Web that's critical,' he said. 'For me Silverlight is much more about getting into .NET than having anything to say about the Adobe story.'"
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/60619,microsoft-silverlight-new-competition-for-flash.aspx

"Silverlight is a cross-platform Web browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications and an alternative to Adobe's Flash Player, which has become the de facto standard for video on the Web."
"The expanded platform support could help Microsoft in its plans to compete with Adobe's Flash, which is installed on nearly all PCs. To distribute Silverlight widely, Microsoft is relying on customers who have built media applications with it."
"Version 1.1 of Silverlight, which Microsoft announced at its Mix 07 conference in May, will be available next year, probably in the summer, [Microsoft staffer Brian Goldfarb] said." [The mini-CLR browser plugin was announced in March 2006 for delivery by the end of that year. -jd]
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9769714-7.html

"Adobe is releasing Moviestar, an upgrade to Flash that supports better-quality video than today. But Goldfarb said that Silverlight will still offer 'significantly better' video quality than Moviestar, especially on less-powerful PCs."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9034359&intsrc=news_ts_head

"Microsoft hopes such partnerships will help drive more than 200 million downloads of the player by the end of June next year, according to Brian Goldfarb, a group product manager for platform & tools strategy in Microsoft's developer division."
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9034359&intsrc=news_ts_head

My reporting at MIX 06:
"There were quotes of eventual audience size, "sometime in 2007 or 2008", "multiple hundreds of millions", "sometime in 2007, if we're lucky, half-a-billion customers"... stats quotes are tricky, and I'd defer to source information with corroborating evidence for such projections."
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2006/03/wpf_notes_i.cfm
Other contemporaneous reporting, with "browser plugin in first half 2007":
http://doteverything.blogspot.com/2006/03/mix06-day-2-wpfe-wpf-everywhere.html

"In April, 2007, when Microsoft announced Silverlight [sic], the press and bloggers immediately tagged it an "Adobe Flash killer."" [Syndicated article by David DeJean.]
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/60619,microsoft-silverlight-new-competition-for-flash.aspx

"'We're finally shipping the plug-in,' said Parimal Desphande, group product manager for the User Experience Platform and Tools team at Microsoft."
"Moonlight 1.0 is expected to be done within six months, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president for the developer platform at Novell, who has been overseeing Moonlight."
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/09/04/ms-silverlight_1.html

"Linux support is one place where Flash has been lagging lately...." [Written by the usually-steady Michael Calore. -jd]
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/microsoft-launc.html

"Goldfarb is quick to point to his platform's outstanding video support, which surpasses that of Flash. Silverlight was designed to present HD video on the web...."
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/09/microsoft-launc.html

"Although we normally love to beat up on Microsoft, Silverlight is great news for consumers as it provides the greatest threat so far to Adobe's dominance in this space. [jd sez: huh?] Microsoft's only problem is driving adoption: Flash has 95%+ penetration in the market. The tech giant will need to use its desktop dominance and key partnerships to get the software on many more machines."
http://mashable.com/2007/09/04/silverlight-1/

Miguel de Icaza of Novell: "Today we are announcing a new collaboration with Microsoft around Silverlight. The Mono team at Novell will implement open source versions of Silverlight 1.0 and Silverlight 1.1... Microsoft will give Novell access to the test suites for Silverlight to ensure that we have a compatible specification... Microsoft will make the codecs for video and audio available to users of Moonlight from their web site."
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Sep-05.html

Scott Guthrie leads off his launchpiece with video credentials: "The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience -- since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser. It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified). It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware." [jd: The overall piece sounds to me a little subdued; the wait for 1.1.]
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/09/04/silverlight-1-0-released-and-silverlight-for-linux-announced.aspx

Ryan Paul Ars Technica: "Microsoft announced yesterday the official release of Silverlight 1.0, a versatile .NET development framework that makes it possible for developers to build web applications that incorporate rich media content and elaborate user interfaces." [jd sez: Interesting phrasing, considering that .NET development has been pushed back to perhaps sometime in 2008.]

Later: "'Until today, it was casual,' [Novell's Miguel] de Icaza told Ars, referring to his team's relationship with Microsoft's Silverlight developers. 'Today we signed the agreement in which we will get access to test suites, specifications and more.'" [jd sez: Usually the problem with specs & testing harnesses is in getting them cleaned up for external use. In this case, I'm not sure why compatibility testing suites would be cleaned up but not generally published.]
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070905-microsoft-releases-silverlight-1-0-announces-linux-support.html

J. Nicholas Hoover in InformationWeek: "Microsoft said it won't use Windows Update to push Silverlight out to consumers, instead relying on content providers and Microsoft.com... Goldfarb said Microsoft's now on track to have Silverlight 1.1 out by next summer."
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201804086

Rich Ziade: "When I think of Microsoft, I imagine a big fat gambler strolling into the casino in a three-piece suit and a cigar. He saunters up to the roulette table, drops a pile of $100 chips and proceeds to put a chip on every number, black and red. He can't lose."
http://www.basement.org/2007/09/microsofts_silverlight_yet_ano.html

In comments at Slashdot, Novell's Miguel de Icaza answers questions about the scope of spec/test cross-licensing. "The specs as published on the web are pretty complete as far as a programming API goes. But there are some things that we do not quite understand how they work, either because the docs are not as complete as they should be, or because as implementors we need more details about the internals than those that are visible to the end user... access to the specs is basically access to some documents and explanations that might not have made it to the public specification."
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?threshold=1&mode=flat&commentsort=0&op=Change&sid=288641&cid=20481353&pid=20481353

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