Microsoft's Silverlight and Mobile

Microsoft released Silverlight yesterday - a cross-platform, cross-browser fast web runtime with all the components and toolsets already available for developers.

The integration of the runtime with other OS's and browsers (eg. Firefox) for me indicates Microsoft acknowledge that they have to support other platforms from the start to gain critical mass and that includes mobile platforms (albeit only windows mobile to start with).

- here's an excerpt from Techcrunch's reporter who was at the launch.

"Mobile
Silverlight was demonstrated today on a Windows mobile device as part of a new service that the NBL have built. The demo showed both Silverlight applications and media streaming running on a mobile phone - so Silverlight even at this stage is about more than just the desktop browser and desktop market. With windows mobile and Symbian now the two dominant mobile platforms, I can’t see any reasons why we won’t see Silverlight on Symbian as well - thus spreading the platform across the vast majority of both desktops and mobiles, something that alternative platforms have not managed to do."

Certainly makes things interesting for Adobe in the Apollo/Flash/Ajax (for Pc desktop /PC Browser) and Flex/FlashLite (for mobile) application development arena. The new S60 Nokia web runtime environment may have some competition too come to think of it ....