LAS VEGAS--Just like its predecessor a year ago, Silverlight 3 is clearly one of the stars of the Microsoft Mix conference under way here this week.
Silverlight is a Web browser plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. (Silverlight also supports Firefox and Safari browsers and Mac OS X in addition to Microsoft Windows. A primarily Novell-developed plug-in, Moonlight, runs on Linux.) Its initial iteration was narrowly focused on media. However, Silverlight's direction is toward enabling a broad class of "rich Internet applications."
So, for example, Silverlight 3 will allow developers to create lightweight Web application experiences that exist outside the browser and offline. Although it retains a strong focus on media, Silverlight is thus starting to look more like a full-fledged rich Internet application.
I'll discuss Silverlight generally in more detail in a future post. More immediately, I want to focus on one demo that I found to be particularly compelling because it addressed a problem that no one has yet cracked in the Web space yet.
The demo, given by David Anthony of Bondi Digital Publishing and Scott Stanfield of Vertigo, came during Wednesday's keynote speech (see video). Bondi has been working with various publishers to put the back issues of magazines online. Vertigo designs and codes software for Microsoft environments; it has been particularly emphasizing visually rich applications built with Silverlight.
Last year, Vertigo's Hard Rock Cafe memorabilia project was a big hit. It used Silverlight's Deep Zoom feature to allow users to dive into and around a digital display of photos, clothing, art, letters, and so forth connected to a variety of rock musicians. Give it a try; it's easier to experience than to explain.
This year's demo also featured Deep Zoom--combined with Silverlight 3's support for deep linking. That is, bookmarking a page within a rich Internet application. (Technically, deep linking is a server-side feature associated with .Net that Silverlight 3 simply exploits.) This demo may not have had quite the "ooh" factor of the Hard Rock one, but I think that it suggests more interesting and more generally useful possibilities.
This year, the project was putting back issues of Rolling Stone magazine online. The basic concept was to show an "entire issue as though pages had the staples torn out of them" with the addition of search and bookmarking features. Thus, you could "flip" through an issue, and dive in to look at detail, if something caught your eye. It's essentially an attempt to replicate the "zero boot time and random access" of a paper magazine as closely as possible.
That's all very nice, though I have to wonder what sort of business model there is around viewing back issues of magazines.
But this--or something like it--could have enormous potential for things like catalogs.
Think about it. What's the nice thing about the user experience associated with a paper catalog? Well, one big thing is that you can flip through it and dive in for a closer look, if a photo or a description catches your eye. Essentially, catalogs are great for browsing.
Contrast this with the typical online catalog. They're great for searching. If you know more or less what you want, search can quickly filter out the almost infinite things that you're not looking for. But casual paging, seeking serendipity? Not so good.
To give just one personal example, I like to flip through the many catalogs that Sierra Trading Post sends to my home, advertising the various overstocks and otherwise heavily discounted products that it sells. I find trying to do the same on Sierra's Web site a poor substitute, unless I'm actively seeking something in particular.
The sort of experience I saw on the stage with Deep Zoom would seem to combine some of the best of the browsing and searching experience. It improves on aspects of a paper catalog; it has search, and the amount of low-level detail isn't constrained by the limits of the printed page. At the same time, it brings browse ability of the digital domain.
It's sometimes a mistake to attempt to mirror the physical world in our computer software. But the way we interact with physical objects is often more than just ingrained. It can just plain work well too. And if we can augment that physical experience in the process of translation, all the better.
[UPDATE 3/19/09: Clarified Silverlight platflorm support.]
It's probably not a wholly accurate description, but to call Mix '08 the conference for "the new Microsoft" doesn't seem that far off. Perhaps even more apt would be to think of it as the show for Microsoft as it aspires to be. Other possibilities? Well, if one were cynical, maybe "the conference for Microsoft as it wishes others to see it." Or if one were sympathetic to the travails of companies with large, and fundamentally conservative, installed bases how about this for a tag line: "If only change were easy as giving a slick conference."
Yet, for all that, having attended numerous Microsoft events over the years, the gestalt of this one was palpably different. One would never mistake Mix '08, held in Las Vegas earlier this month, for a Tech-Ed, much less a WinHEC. It's not just a case of different session tracks or appropriate obeisance to the rise of network-based computing in a Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie keynote, though those were certainly present. Rather it was an infusion of different attitudes and behaviors--and software releases that offered evidence of at least nascent change.
Silverlight, Microsoft's Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, makes a good study point. Silverlight is most notably a competitor to the Adobe Integrated Runtime (aka AIR, nee Apollo). It's essentially an approach to using the horsepower of a "thick client" PC to allow applications being delivered over the network be as responsive and immersive as they would be with a typical client app.
I bring up Silverlight for a couple of reasons. The first is that Mix '08 saw the release of Silverlight 2 beta 1, which is really the first full release of Silverlight. (Ray Ozzie referred to it as "delivering on Silverlight's potential.") Whereas Silverlight 1 was narrowly focused on media, Silverlight 2 is a subset of the full desktop Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) UI framework, and also adds networking and local storage options.
In any case, Silverlight was clearly one of the stars of the conference. (There's a lot of information and some very cool demos in the conference sessions--videos of which are all posted online.) I took the opportunity to sit down with Brad Becker, Microsoft's Group Product Manager for the UX (User Experience) & Tools Marketing Group to discuss a it in a bit more depth. We talked about how HTML and JavaScript are being forced to fill roles they were never intended to fill at the same time that user richness and usability expectations are growing. About how Flash was originally "designed to bring Mickey Mouse to the Web"--not interactive, high-resolution media. About the blurring lines between design and development (another interesting thread but out-of-scope here).
And then Brad pulled out a MacBook (running OS X). "Cross platform is a reflection of reality," he explained. A calculated stunt? Hardly. I won't say that Mac's were commonplace among the Microsoft employees at the event. But they were hardly rare (although a few of the big Apple logos that dominate a MacBook's lid were papered over with Silverlight stickers.)
I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that you wouldn't have seen Microsoft employees, including execs, casually carrying around Macs at a conference a few years back. Winds of change are welling up. However faintly.
Does this mean that Microsoft is agnostic about whether developers develop to Windows and .NET? Of course not. But it's worth noting this week I'm in Salt Lake City at Novell's Brainshare user conference. (Yes, it has been a busy month.) Novell execs such as CTO Jeff Jaffe make no bones about their preference for a J2EE on Linux software stack. Yet, Novell remains a major force behind the Mono Project that allows .NET applications to run on Linux and other non-Windows operating environments. And Novell is doing the Linux port of Silverlight ("Moonlight").
In other words, in this day and age, expressing interest--even a strong one--for a given development stack increasingly doesn't translate into prohibiting any sort of interoperability or compatibility with the "enemy." The on-the-ground reality is naturally much messier than executive-level shows of mutual love and respect, but it's still a qualitatively different reality from the old days when walled gardens had high walls indeed.
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