Silverlight Aims at Flash Video

The cross-platform, cross-browser subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) previously known by the code name WPF/E (for “Everywhere”) has been christened Silverlight. Microsoft is expected to provide technical details on Silverlight at its MIX conference at the end of April 2007, but Silverlight is clearly aimed at providing an alternative to Adobe’s popular Flash runtime, with an initial focus on Flash’s role as a Web video format.

Initial Focus on Internet Video

Flash is a cross-platform Web technology commonly used in advertisements and marketing sites, and Adobe has aspirations for Flash as a platform for building applications for the Internet and corporate intranet use. Because it allows developers to create videos and, potentially, full-featured applications that run on any browser and any OS, Flash represents the same kind of long-term threat to Microsoft that Java posed: if it is adopted by large numbers of developers, Microsoft would lose one of its biggest advantages, the large number of applications that run only on its Windows OSs.