Review of Silverlight Strategy from Mix08

Gartner just posted a very interesting review of Microsoft's strategy from Mix08'. While I find the article pretty positive and mostly complete, there are a few things missing here.

1) Tools development - While not the key to the conference and barely noticed in the report is that we have been doing more work around integration of our development tools for developers and designers to close the gap between them. The outcome of this as we rapidly execute on this, will be faster time to market for application development across the board as well as more opportunities for designers to change the user experience of not just web applications but also applications on the desktop.

2) Monetizing applications - They don't really discuss how we are making sure our partners can monetize their applications. Sure we are going to make it easier to integrate and create compelling ads and we demonstrated a taste of this at Mix, but we are keen on making sure our partners can make money and that our technology (SL, WPF, VS2008, .Net Framework) is the enabler for this. Not just top line revenue or ads, but also saving money on bottom line costs like developer costs, code management, etc., traditional ROI costs.

Overall a good read either way..

C