Flash attack: Microsoft woos creatives on Silverlight


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Analysis: While PDF implementation remains an imprecise science, Adobe has no answer for Redmond's media blitz -- or the announcement at Expression 2.0 of new Silverlight authoring tools.

May 1, ORLANDO, FL. Hell didn't freeze over quite yet, but a couple of weird things happened this morning at the Aquent CRE8/PDF Conference: First, Microsoft reached out to the creative community of print and web designers by dispatching two high-level presenters to preview Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Flash.
Second, at the end of the presentation, the crowd of several hundred creatives in attendance gave them an enthusiastic response they usually reserve for the likes of Adobe presenters slathering on the “wow” in previewing a new technology or even Apple connecting with their faithful -- and never for Microsoft.

Clad in jeans on the dais, Brian Goldfarb, Microsoft group product manager for user experience platform and tools strategy and colleague Arturo Toledo, technical product manager for Microsoft Expression Silverlight media development tools, spoke of cultural change at Microsoft. They patiently laid out the case for Silverlight to what normally would have been a hostile audience of Apple- and Adobe loyalists unreceptive to anything Redmond would offer.

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Adobe, however, wasn't there. Microsoft stepped in as a show sponsor when Adobe declined to renew its traditional sponsorship here.

Microsoft traditionally appealed more to developers than designers in its software, Goldfarb told the crowd, but in the last few years--the company is rethinking that, as evidenced by its upgrading of company infrastructure to improve user experience by hiring design-minded engineers (last week, it came out that Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom guru/architect Mark Hamburg left Adobe for Microsoft). Their mission is to create attractive, intuitive, un-Microsoft applications and to bridge the disconnect present between designers of web content and the developers charged with executing their designs.

"I think this is one of the most fundamental problems that we're trying to solve: How do we really integrate these two worlds?" Goldfarb said. "I visit agencies all the time. The developers sit over here, the designers sit over there. It's like an eighth-grade dance."

Redmond is reaching out to designers by developing an online community as well as with sharp new revs of its Expression authoring tools -- 2.0 versions announced today--to make implementing Silverlight media simpler for the average designer. As further inducement to try out the Flash alternative, Microsoft also is offering a free hosting service for designers to upload their Silverlight projects, with up to 4 terabytes per month free streaming bandwidth.

Then came the familiar numbers argument: Goldfarb said that they're getting 1.5 million player downloads a day, which he projected will increase to 2.5 million/day over the next two months.

But this was the one Microsoft-wary crowd numbers and bribes couldn't sway. They were more interested in the media Microsoft had to demo than words about its commitment to better interface design. And it was stunning: A preview of the Silverlight-driven HD webcast site for the Beijing Olympics, where visitors will be able to watch up to four sports at once, customize pop-up news bulletins to their interests, will pop up and offer links to breaking stories (such as cutting in for a possible gold-medal gymnastics routine while you're watching a nonmedal basketball game) and consume other media such as expert commentary, highlight replays, and video arranged in constantly-evolving lists of most-watched links. Not only will the site be a coming-out proof-of-concept for Silverlight, but it will also help Microsoft acquire the worldwide penetration on desktop machines it so craves for the player.

Goldfarb also wowed with a preview of a new “deep zoom” feature with Silverlight in which a Web developer can load a 2+ gigapixel image on a Website but the desktop player manages bandwidth so the viewer sees just a screenful at a time an sidesteps the massive download such an image normally would require.

An informal poll of Toledo and several other technical experts in attendance concluded it's likely that no one's yet attempted to embed a Silverlight file into high-end, interactive PDFs like designers/developers currently can with Flash--but it is theoretically possible given the features of both technologies. Perhaps, one expert mused, it might offer an opportunity to an enterprising Acrobat developer to write a plug-in or app that would make it easier for less-technical-minded designers to inject Silverlight media files into PDFs.


Saludos, GAby Menta

By PDFZone