The next time I tried it, at an Internet cafe in another city, I got a prompt demanding that I download Microsoft Silverlight. Of course, this was impossible as you can’t put anything on a hard drive at a library or internet cafe, let alone “restart the browser” which may be necessary!

I am totally p’d off at microsoft using its muscle to shove this crap down my throat, particularly when they are holding my money hostage to the world agreeing to do things their way. I got the cameras solely to be able to remote view them at librarys, etc., in other citys. You can’t really carry a notebook with you anymore when you fly, as it might be taken away from you especially when you reenter this country, and “sent back to you when they are finished examining it” (you never get it)..

Microsoft can take its extortion to blazes with it. IE 8 is full of bugs and will never be adopted by internet cafes, and I hope they go to Linux instead!!

While I agree with you that Silverlight is driving a lot of innovation in the RIA space and the competition is good for everyone .. I still find this move unfair, my previous comment explains that .. what do you feel about that perspective?

Mrinal

P.S: I appreciate that people at Microsoft care to respond to such concerns

This is fair, we’re playing by the rules and ensuring that our millions of .NET customers whom have asked us for Silverlight for years, get reach with their customers. Whilst it may annoy a few folks whom are in the Adobe community as not being “fair” please keep in mind, for years we shipped Flash (without being optional) inside Windows, to the point where the 98% ubiquity success hailed from this deal.

We consider Silverlight a viable investment for not only our future, but that of the RIA. As Silverlight has not only finaly provided a mainstream choice, but it’s pushing Adobe into action, which in turn is producing more and more rounds of innovation for you folks.

This is a positive thing, despite Adobe’s posture about “us vs them”, as in the end, you can do both and I’ve always stated this. There doesn’t have to be one single runtime to rule them all, there can be more than one. As in the end, if you prefer Flex over Silverlight (which is fine, each to their own) then in the end you can feed off the innovation that comes from Adobe as they continue to look for ways to one-up Silverlight.

I’ve seen more action from Adobe/Macromedia in the last year, than I’ve seen being a community member in the last 10 years.

why is that bad?

-
Scott Barnes
Rich Platforms Product Manager
Microsoft.

My previous comment explains my concern.

Mrinal

I agree that an ideal world where every plugin is present on every machine and the decisions we developers have to make are only based on the merit of the technology.. would be great … but this world of RIA isn’t so ideal .. there are several technologies competing and this move by Microsoft doesnt seem fair to me .. I’m tempted to think of Curl .. they have a fairly good technology and their biggest problem, just like Microsoft is adoption .. is this move fair to them?

Also, pretty much every web company is getting into the business of making browser plugins … Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Google, Yahoo .. I’m sure there are many more to come .. so the thought that concerns me is … should all these plugins grow organically or should these companies feel free to use their existing installations on the desktop to boost adoption … to me the second choice is somewhat disconcerting

In response to Brian’s comment, Flash Player 6 was included with Windows XP because Microsoft used Flash in the product tour.

Plus it’s a little naive to think that content alone will dictate the most successful platform, Microsoft have proven several times before that pockets that go multi-million dollars deep are capable of marketing anything (just try opening a 200 page document in word and watch your $4000 machine crawl)