MIX08 Microsoft Presentation - Great introduction to latest Microsoft Products

I finally managed to watch (bit by bit) the 2.5 hour video of the presentation by Microsoft at MIX08.


It was a great presentation by Microsoft on various upcoming products and releases. The presentation starts with a keynote from Ray Ozzie, Chief Software Architect, Microsoft, after which the stage is conducted by Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager Internet Explorer, and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Division.



Watch the Live Streaming Keynote: Ray Ozzie, Dean Hachamovitch, and Scott Guthrie


I had covered Dean's presentation on Internet Explorer 8 in my previous blog post.

Now I had watch the rest of the video showcasing Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 and .net services. This second half of the presenation with main focus on Silverlight 2.0 beta was even more interesting and engaging than the IE8 demo. I was so thrilled by the showcasing of Silverlight 2.0 beta.


One thing is for sure.. Adobe has some serious competition for their solution for writing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) - Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Btw, I learnt from the presentation that NBC is hosting the official olympics website which is going to provide live streaming of sports events and also provide a Video-on-demand. NBC apparently has used Silverlight extensively for their web site.



NBC Olympics Player

Silverlight vs Flash - War for mobile web dominance

Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flash) are trying desperately to push their respective technologies for developing RIA (Rich Internet Applications).

Both seem to be taking this further ahead to mobile devices. Recently, Microsoft had signed a deal with Nokia to integrate Silverlight on Nokia's latest S60 based smart phones.

Adobe though having a dominance in the PC space must be doubly worried after Steve's comments on why Flash may not suited for iPhone.

I found this post from Robert Scoble providing interesting insight on why Apple may feel that Flash is not good for iPhone. More than the article, I found the user comments more intreseting.

Also, it got clear to me from the user comments that Apple was trying to port Flash 8 (and not Flash Lite - stripped down version) onto the iPhone.