Internet News

Silverlight

IInternet & Technology

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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While Google's net based Office Products are just toys so far, they are working to move word processing, spread sheets and presentation work off the desktop and make them available across the network.  How this will be priced is not known.  It could be by use license or following Google's past methods using advertising.

Meanwhile Microsoft has not been asleep on the job.  They have come out with a new search engine called Bing and a new way to look at the net with a technology called Silverlight.

Silverlight

Silverlight seems to be Microsoft's answer to Flash Technology, but much more.  It is a streaming video tool that is handled by all the popular browsers with a small plug-in.  That's the way Flash works too. 

You see Flash technology all the time as animations and videos propagate the web.  So what's all that new about Silverlight?

It appears that Microsoft is trying to integrate the browser, the desktop and the server as a single development entity.

The are trying to attract outside developers with a consistent Software Development Kit (SDK) and make the environment rich and easy to use.  They have caught the development bug.  They know that they cannot do everything themselves so they want as many outside developers as possible.   This is the new wave of software development that has been going on for about 10 years.

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How will you be able to benefit from Silverlight?  It is sure that entertainment people are very interested in it because the same presentation of video can be achieved on a big screen or a small I-phone like device because you can scale the video.  A good explanation of this can be seen on the YouTube Silver Light explanation 

Since it's a race to integrate information content, advertising, office, home and entertainment, we should watch these technologies carefully.

Microsoft has vowed to keep this technology open.  It now runs in all the popular browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

Will it all of a sudden hit the market like a sledgehammer?  Since it is compute bandwidth intensive, it may take some time for us to catch up to it.  If you have a slow speed line, then forget it.

To go along with Siverlight, Microsoft has vowed to have the video storage available online for everybody's use like a super YouTube.  This has attracted movie makers and commercial television to work with the technology.  Companies that used to deliver (and still do) movies by mail are more and more turning to delivery by the Internet. Netflix is an example

The trick is to be able to entertain on small and big screens with little loss of content.  The 'walk around' customer is the big one.  You can see that if you travel a subway and watch the kids with their phones.  They are texting and sending and watching videos.  They are big consumers of technology and advertising.