Popfly for making websites.. powered by silverlight,including ready to compile Starter templates for full blown websites that are incredible .

now count one and one :

it is free and so will spread around within months

Experienced developers should have a little longer view of the market and the internet. If MS is allowed to dominate, progress will slow and expenses will increase for all of us and for our customers. Large enterprises have understood this for years. Most of them buy enough of competitive products to existing monopolies to keep the competition alive. If they do not, then they know that they will be subject to predatory pricing at some point along the curve. At a smaller level, looking at products that do not attract such large corporate support, only small developers and companies are able to support and sustain these products. Many are superior to and cost competitive to the larger products. Yes, it means taking a few risks, but so does the “stick with the monopoly” strategy. Do you want to bleed to death slowly or take a chance and possibly win. I’ve been in this business long enough to remember the old slogan, “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM”, and largely, it was true, but it wasn’t right then, and it isn’t right now. Those who stuck with IBM to the bitter end, often drowned their companies along with themselves. No, IBM did not die, but it does not even resemble the dominant monopolist that it once was, nor does it cover nearly so much of the marketplace as it once did. If a company did not have a balanced purchasing policy in place, it’s competitors left it behind, by reducing costs and changing strategies. Monopolies eventually break down, vision is lost, technology makes drastic changes, leaving the monopolist’s huge investments as sunk cost against newer companies with far less overhead. The weakness of Vista is obvious to any with a little bit of technical knowledge. With Silver..anything, they are not ready to face a commoditized computing market being lead by the OLPC(One Laptop Per Child) movement. Really, neither is Intel. The duopoly is about to break down. The world does not need something with shinier pictures, it needs ubiquitous computing and communication. Yes, there will always be a market for the newer and the shinier, but it will be a niche compared to the absolutely tremendous market represented by the rest of the world that has little or nothing of computing and communications. It’s the spammers market mode, with only one response for millions of attempts. Profits will commoditize as they have with the cell phone market. In fact, the two will somewhat merge. Computing will achieve a utility status like water, power, gas, and sewer in the first world. As people learn how to do these other utilities through the internet and ubiquitous computing, they will never allow themselves to again be isolated. How can you keep them down on the farm when they’ve seen Paris.

So, look ahead a little past the toes of your shoes, or you’re likely to step over a really big cliff without ever having seen it. And, you’ll take your customers with you.

“The only thing I care is to make right choices for myself as an independent software developer.”

 Could you point out some of the benefits that you saw for your end users when you made the decision to go with SL.

I can’t see Silverlight going the way of the dodo simply because it is Microsoft we’re talking about and they are very heavily invested in this. For your users, the worst case scenario is the initial problem of having to install Silverlight if they don’t already have it.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that neither Flash nor Silverlight are mutually exclusive. You can have both co-existing on the same system/browser/webpage without a problem.

It’s not like a site that requires IE or a program that requires OS X: it’s a much more of a subtle distinction than it is a detour or roadblock for most run-of-the-mill PC users.

The problem only arises on non-officially-supported platforms which happen to also have a certain bias against MS, as is expected (and tbh mostly deserved).

XBox example. True. It is not #1. It is in its second version now and it reached parity with the ex market leader Sony. Sony PS3 is not doing good. XBOX is at the same point now when IE was when it reached parity with NN, I think. 

Zune is not a bomb as a direction. Zune currently is just a version 1. It was supposed to be a bomb. MS version 1 always is. Its goal is to get into the game and start learning. version 2 is to become a real contender. version 3 is to match the leader. version 4 is to become the leader. More or less.  This is one thing I found MS perfecting. They never give up on strategically important things.

I see SL as strategic to them. I might be wrong. But if I am not, I count on SL being progressively better. Just like MS media player was in the battle with RealPlayer. Who remembers RP now?

So I chose SL for my RIA. Only time will tell if I chose wrong. Because if  I did, and SL does not reach mass market status, my application will be useless.

 Not entirely true. In fact less and less. It isn’t the same world today. The XBox for instance hasn’t done too bad, but it’s not number one. Zune is pretty much a bomb. Now you may say “well that’s hardware, not software”, but the market share numbers for Windows are on the slide as well. I wouldn’t say they “own” ECMA either, because they could very well lose the battle on ES 4. The PR damage done by the hyjinks in the ISO standards process for OOXML, I think is more profound than some may be thinking as well.
 

 I’ll give you my description of Microsoft on the internet. Remember, non-internet MSN was supposed to be all that was needed. Then, MS made a fast 180 and suddenly the internet was THE most important thing. They bought a copy of the old Mosaic from which the first Netscape came, and then turned it into the first IE, which was a total piece of junk, but it was “free”, and bundled with the OS, which robbed Netscape of a revenue stream, while leaving them to compete with the resources of a monopoly. Well, we all know the results of that. We also know that until IE7, IE was a total joke except where it used non-compatible stuff to trap users into having to have it for whichever sites they could coerce or convince to use their proprietary stuff. MS is really a lot more like an elephant than a gorilla. It takes an elephant a while to get going, but when they do get going, they can move awful fast, with the unfortunate side effect of trampling any who get in the way on their way to the head of the herd. Then, when they get to the head of the herd, they trumpet the idea that they really were always the leader…yup, dontcha know.
 

Can the mod here tell me if swearing is ok, coz I will come back and swear my heart out. 

Not all is rosy, of cause,  but it is an alfa.

I don’t worry about availability or market share. SL2 is 4.5 meg, which on broadband is almost instant. MS can always make it part of the update. Making thier site based on SL is even smarter. They put themselves in the corner on purpose - they’ll have to make it work smooth.