Tuesday, Mar 25, 2008    Text size: 

Nope. And that's the problem facing the computer giant.

Silverlight is Microsoft's little-known answer to Adobe's Flash application. Microsoft's Brian Goldfarb leads the Silverlight development team, and while he spends a lot of his time trying to make it a better program, he spends just as much time explaining what it is to the uninitiated.

But whenever possible, Goldfarb explains why he thinks Silverlight is better – without alienating anyone, of course.

"What I want to avoid is arbitrarily pushing things on people's machines," he said. "Apple just jammed Safari 3.1 down as part of iTunes."

In order to raise Silverlight's currently low profile, Golfarb and his staff are wheeling and dealing, searching for ways to get Silverlight onto more than the 2 percent of computers that now run it. The company experimented with including Silverlight with its latest version of Office for Mac, even though Office doesn't use the application, not even as a plugin.

But surfers who use the MSN toolbar may have noticed some of Silverlight's functionality in action when they navigated dynamic content or lined up RSS feeds to keep an eye on.

Given the widespread use of Adobe's Flash in the adult industry – from web and graphic design to content distribution – the addition of another industry-standard application would inconvenience a lot of industry professionals.

Webmasters Joe Hochstuhl told XBIZ that Flash is fine for now.

"One personal observation about Silverlight – this is a classic Microsoft attempt to muscle in on another company's dominant role in a technology," said Hochstuhl, who heads up NDTS Development. "Webmasters are well into Flash development and have been for quite some time. Silverlight currently has version two in beta, and while it does some cool things with regard to online graphics and integration with AJAX via Javascript, it still has a very long way to go to work itself into the common webmaster's field of vision."

For more information on Silverlight, visit Microsoft.com or the official development portal for Silverlight.