Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Adobe's Flash player, is getting backing from .NET, the company's application development platform.
The company is also offering free hosting and bandwidth for Silverlight-developed applications, opened up a few more web services APIs and made its commercial licensing terms more generous.
The products and services were announced by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, during a keynote speech at the company's Mix 07 developers conference.
Silverlight is a browser plug-in runtime not unlike the ubiquitous Flash player from Adobe. Microsoft launched it at a broadcasters' conference two weeks ago, and it's largely designed for video playback with flashy graphical interactivity -- now often referred to as rich internet applications or RIAs.
Now, according to Ozzie and other Microsoft executives who took the stage yesterday, Silverlight is based on the .NET framework and will act as a runtime for .NET applications to run in the browser.
It's a way for Microsoft to attract developers interested in making web applications that a more functional than the typical old-style form-based interface. Nowadays, that means AJAX developers, using primarily JavaScript on the browser side.
"The web over the last years has been mostly about AJAX, about increasing the richness of the user experience through the magic of DHTML, and clever browser hackery," Ozzie said in his keynote. "But AJAX development has its limitations and certainly there are better languages than JavaScript to use for many of the sophisticated apps that developers want to build."
Microsoft is playing nice with Silverlight in terms of support. It works in Safari and Firefox browsers, as well as Microsoft's own Internet Explorer, and it can be used with server-side applications written in any of the 37 languages .NET supports, the company said.
Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's general manager of developer tools, said that Silverlight includes "the exact same" .NET Common Language Runtime engine that Microsoft ships with the desktop CLR, which should make Silverlight applications perform well in the browser.
It also includes an HTML library with full Document Object Model support, a networking stack, and support for a subset of the Windows Presentation Foundation user interface framework that made its debut with Windows Vista, according to Guthrie.
Alongside the client app, Microsoft has launched Silverlight Streaming, a free sponsorship-supported hosting service for Silverlight applications.
In the beta test of the service, users will get 4GB of space and streaming up to 700Kbps for free. After the beta is over, a the free version will insert Microsoft advertising. Developers can pay for the advertising-free version.
While most of the nitty-gritty product details were delivered by Guthrie, Ozzie spent some time during the keynote outlining Microsoft's vision of software-as-a-service.
Or, as Ozzie phrased it, recognizing Microsoft's continued role as a provider of client applications, "software-AND-a-service".
"Even software-as-a-service vendors have found the need to expand their offerings to include an offline edition," he said. "The term SAAS has for all practical purposes been expanded at this point, and now it means software and a service."
It's a trade-off for developers between the drive "to deliver an experience to the broadest audience possible" through the web and the desire to maximize the capabilities of the access device by creating and offline app, Ozzie said.
"Some solutions might be viewed as a service with a client-side companion. Others might be viewed as client software, with a service companion," he said.
Our View
It's possible to interpret some of Ozzie's scripted remarks yesterday as something like minor back-pedaling on the notion of software as services.
To be clear, Microsoft's strategy doesn't appear to have changed, and Ozzie still seems very enthusiastic about Microsoft's services future, but the messaging made it clearer that the company isn't giving up on fat client apps, and that the rest of the industry shouldn't assume the death of installed software any time soon.
The idea of "software AND a service" is clearly something we'll be hearing more of from Microsoft, though whether it will enter the industry's standard lingo remains to be seen.
There may even have been some blink-and-you-miss-it subtle demonization of hosted services during the keynote, with Ozzie's comparison of online services' "monitoring, and auditing, and creepy behavioral analytics" versus local "privacy, empowerment, anonymity and freedom".
Unless we're reading too much into the choice of words, it's interesting to note that here we have four positive words describing local software, and a bunch of boring and/or threatening stuff to describe hosted services.
That would be a far cry from the Ozzie who beat the services meme to death in the famous "Internet Services Disruption" memo leaked in October 2005.
