Most of you are probably like me when you first heard about Silverlight and saw the pre-release demo. You asked, "Why would I ever do video editing through a web browser, let alone over the Internet?" And you know what, you were not alone. Microsoft has repeatedly screwed up the release of many of its products over the past 3-4 years, and is very aware of how bad their marketing attempts have been. I went to a special and FREE 8 hour presentation on TFS last year where Microsoft admitted that they didn't know what information companies wanted to know about moving to TFS. It didn't matter that TFS is by far superior to the IBM Rational products, or that the licensing costs are only a tiny fraction of the $250,000 licensing costs for the IBM Rational Suite. Microsoft failed to provide information on all the steps necessary to move to it.
Silverlight has it even worse off as it is one of the core technologies that was presented with Windows Vista, which is probably the absolute worst marketing job that Microsoft has done for any version of Windows. Again, Microsoft didn't lay everything out and people learned that the spiffy new computer that they had bought the prior year and screamed under Windows XP or Windows 2003 Server, dropped to about 25% of that performance under Windows Vista. On top of that, it is probably going to be at least another 2 years before all hardware manufacturers write 64 bit drivers for their products. This happened when we went from 16 bit Windows to 32 bit Windows, and its happening now as we've been moving from 32 bit Windows to 64 bit Windows for the past 5 years.
You're probably asking, "When is this idiot going to get to talking about Silverlight 2? You know, the topic of this post." Well, Silverlight is suffering from all of the above. It was mismarketed during beta, it presented a useless video editing application upon release, it only supported a few browsers, the performance was horrendous, and unless you have an MSDN subscription the tools are prohibitively expensive. While the later may still be true (there are 3rd party alternatives now), Microsoft is finally beginning to do what it does best. They have been listening to developers and taken care of all of the other issues. I haven't fully looked at all of the Silverlight web site, but I have known that this release was being geared to the general Web 2.0 developer, and it does support the current release of all the major browsers.
I have a feeling that within a few years that people will stop frequenting non-Web 2.0 sites in preference of Web 2.0 sites like those that Silverlight is now targeting. The Facebook, MySpace, and YouTubes of today may be the Sega Genesis of tomorrow. Who is going to make the cross over, and who is going to crash and burn? Will Community Server make it? Some very interesting questions that will be answered over the next couple of years. Till then, will you survive?