http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/01/take-time-to-understand-silverlight-its-important/
I agree that Silverlight is important, but Mr. Arrington gave such a content-light, gushing, oh-my-gawd report of it, that all my BS meters went off. Then they went off the charts when it turns out that HE WAS PART OF THE PRESENTATION, ON THE STAGE INTERVIEWING THE DEVELOPERS.
The comments have more meat, but of course there is the usual MS-bashing lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.
Here was my post in the comments:
Something that seems lost in the original post and in the comments is the business angle on this.
Microsoft is a platform company.
They have consistently made business decisions on attacks to the platform. IE was a repsonse to Netscape, Windows Media was a response to Real, .Net was a response to Java, etc… Now that Flash/Flex is becoming a platform in its own right that is diminishing the importance of the operating system that it runs on, MS unveils silverlight. MS may talk about how cross-platform silverlight is, but if it isn’t going to sell more copies of Windows it would never make it out the door. This announcement is just another in a series from MS (see the above list and remember MS’s commitment to cross-platform on those) where the other shoe will drop eventually. Maybe this will be like IE or Real where MS comes out with Mac versions only to drop them after they have achieved dominance or maybe this is like .Net where there is a head-fake to cross-platform, but that was really just FUD.
It isn’t this announcement to watch, it is the follow-on ones.