One way you can tell how good a product launch is by waiting for the day after effect. Are people still talking about it? Still excited? Does it cause people like Steve Gillmor to change opinions?
The answer after reading all my feeds is yes. And the real story hasn’t even been written. Last night I asked Scott Guthrie whether he thought Google would use Silverlight. He told me he thinks they’ll have to at some point.
In the past, I would probably have written that off as some kind of corporate hubris. But not this time.
I can see Microsoft coming at Google with a raft of stuff built on top of Silverlight. For end users at home it’ll look slicker, feel better, and have far better video quality than anything Google can throw at Windows users with YouTube/Flash/etc.
Is it enough yet to say that Microsoft has an internet strategy? Not quite.
But the foundation has been built.
It’ll be interesting to see how Mozilla, Adobe, Google respond cause what Microsoft did yesterday can’t be escaped. In the hallway I met Jeff Prosise, co-founder of Wintellect. He told me that yesterday will be remembered as the day Microsoft rebooted the Web. Hyperbole? Maybe, but don’t miss why he’s excited: he’s going to be able to take his .NET skills and make Web experiences that are going to be far beyond what you can do with HTML and AJAX.
I also asked Scott Guthrie if the Office team was going to use Silverlight to bring us an online Office. He gave the corporate-PR answer, but the smile on his face said all that needed to be said. Microsoft isn’t about to let Google take over the Office space and now they have the platform to build upon and keep up with Google’s PhDs.
If you haven’t been reading my link blog, now would be an excellent time to start. I’ve put 38 articles, great stuff there much of which you won’t find on Digg or TechMeme, including the best writeups on the Microsoft announcements that I could find.
UPDATE: Laszlo says “don’t forget about us.” I think they are now in play for an acquisition from Google.
