– Brian Goldfarb, Group Product Manager, Microsoft

While the UIRC has interviewed a handful of Microsoft thought leaders about Silverlight designer-developer workflows and its underlying technology, we decided to ask the 800-pound gorilla questions to Brian Goldfarb, group product manager, about the business benefits of Silverlight.

In this no-holds-barred Q&A session, Goldfarb answers 12 probing questions about Silverlight as Microsoft jockeys to position itself in the RIA space.

Q. Can you briefly tell us what your role is on the Silverlight team, and what your job title is?

A. Group product manager. I run the .NET Platform business in the Developer Division and oversee the marketing for Microsoft’s Web and client developer technologies including WPF, Silverlight, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, etc.

Q. As Silverlight hits the marketplace, here’s the 800-pound gorilla question: What’s the difference between Silverlight and Flash?

A. The short answer – Silverlight is better.

But more appropriately, get ready for a long answer.

Some of the scenarios for Flash and Silverlight usage are similar, such as rich media/video within Web sites, and interactive rich content for e-commerce, e-learning or advertising. However, Silverlight uses a dramatically different approach for creating and delivering experiences in a way that aligns more with our customers’ development and deployment needs, which enables better UX, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and a broader set of business opportunities.

Based on proven .NET technology, Silverlight provides unparalleled developer productivity by enabling the reuse of skills, code, assets and tools. Silverlight 2 beta includes more than 40 new controls, cross-domain networking support for calling REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and standard HTTP services and a rich .NET base class library of functionality (collections, IO, generics, threading, globalization, XML, local storage and more). Silverlight 2 also introduces Deep Zoom, which offers unparalleled interactivity with high resolution content.

Microsoft is tackling the foremost barrier, “development complexity,” bridging the gap between creative designers and development teams, so that rich user experiences can be achieved at reduced cost, which in turn optimizes business opportunity. Expression Studio works seamlessly with Visual Studio 2008 to enable designers and developers to collaborate on the creation of better user experiences on the desktop, the Web and beyond.

Silverlight offers true HD video and the lowest TCO solution for media delivery and consumption. Microsoft is enabling new business opportunities by making it easier to build ads that plug into Silverlight and work with myriad network and syndication providers in the ecosystem. With support for Atlas and DoubleClick, we are just at the tipping point of the amazing business opportunities possible with Silverlight.

Microsoft’s client/Web platform offerings span Windows to the Web, and include emerging surfaces such as the media/living room (Xbox360, Media Center PC), as well as mobile devices. Each of these platforms has shared capabilities and development tooling, but has greatly different performance and integration characteristics. By comparison, Adobe Flash®, Flex and AIR are all variants of the Flash animation plug-in that Adobe acquired from Macromedia. They share a presentation and programming framework that was first developed for “skip-intro” and other pre-broadband experiences in the browser, and, while that framework has incrementally evolved to add better programming, it lacks the integration, performance and tooling necessary to build many of the applications and content experiences that will be increasingly of interest to many businesses.

Microsoft also has a long history of enabling enterprise application development, which makes Silverlight appropriate for a broad range of solutions. Further, our focus on amazing servers (SQL Server, IIS, Windows Server, Windows Media Services and others) gives Silverlight access to a huge ecosystem of technology and investments that have been proven over time.

Q. Given the differences, why does the end-user care if the application was built with Flash or Silverlight? In other words, what’s the value to the end-user of Silverlight RIAs over Flash RIAs?

A. Do most consumers care or know about the product used to build or consume applications? I doubt it. Consumers want great content and a great experience — which Silverlight definitely delivers. Consumers benefit because we make it easier for businesses to deliver solutions that they may not have had access to before.

Q. Do you foresee users downloading Silverlight as a barrier to adoption? Why, why not?

A. No, because it’s so easy — it takes 4-10 seconds. It’s not a matter of if Silverlight will have ubiquitous distribution; it’s just a matter of when. And, when isn’t that far off with over 1.5 million downloads per day and accelerating quickly.

Q. What’s the size of the plug-in?

Silverlight 2 is approximately a 4MB download.

Q. Can you tell our readers about the online broadcast mechanism for the Summer 2008 Olympics for NBC that Microsoft built? I heard it’s brilliant!

A. While I can’t get into the details (there isn’t enough room!), rest assured Microsoft is likely the only company with the scope of technical assets and relationships out there to make this happen. NBC turned to Microsoft because they knew together we’d be successful. The system is varied and includes content capture, encoding, transmission, caching, data integration and distribution (just to name a few capabilities). Use your imagination to see just how “brilliant” it is and know that Microsoft technology including Silverlight is what makes it all possible.

Q. Can you reveal any other Silverlight projects Microsoft has in the pipeline for other content providers?

A. I would but I’d have to …  Just look into the light.

Q. Are there any Silverlight production applications out there — anything I can point our readers to?

A. There are thousands of Silverlight applications in production that we know about, and I’m sure thousands more that we aren’t aware of. I would recommend readers check out our showcase on http://silverlight.net/showcase to get a taste. One Microsoft experience I saw recently that I really enjoyed was http://www.microsoft.com/success .

Q. How will Silverlight achieve the mantra of “develop once, deploy to many,” particularly to mobile and beyond?

A. It’s all about .NET. Now, every .NET developer can target the desktop, Web, mobile and beyond.

Q. Will Silverlight applications run on the desktop with or without third-party utilities?

A. Silverlight’s sweet spot and primary intention is for browser-based applications.

For desktop applications, Microsoft has Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). However, it’s easy to reuse assets and code built for Silverlight inside a WPF application — in most cases, unmodified. WPF gives developers even more power for building the richest client experiences possible including 3D hardware accelerated graphics, access to devices and peripherals, online/offline, and the ability to deeply integrate into other applications like Microsoft Office. Microsoft also offers a full stack of offline storage capabilities and a comprehensive Sync Framework that also enables offline and collaboration capabilities for any device, application, service or rich Internet client.

Q. So, in summary, what are the top-line, compelling reasons Silverlight RIAs will permeate virtual space?

• Better user experiences thanks to true HD, reliable streaming performance.
  
  
• Better development experience thanks to .NET.
  
  
• Rich content pipeline generated by our partners and customers — the NBCOlympics.com alone!

Read more about Silverlight and other Microsoft projects on Brian Goldfarb’s blog Drinking from the Firehose.

About Brian Goldfarb
Brian Goldfarb is the group product manager on the Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft. Over the last few years, Brian has been focused on helping drive the direction and strategy behind Microsoft's latest set of Web development technologies, including ASP.NET, Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express Edition. Brian graduated with degrees in computer science and economics from Duke University.