Silverlight was shown to the public for the first time at the recent Las Vegas National Association of Broadcasters show. Microsoft are aiming the new browser plug-in squarely at Adobe’s Flash and claim its interactive Web capabilities and streaming video will be superior even to QuickTime’s.

Instead of using special new magic to display vector-based graphics, text, animations and video, Silverlight will integrate with existing tools such as Apache, JavaScript and XHTML. A Windows-only creation application, Expression, will be released in June as an alternative to Adobe’s Creative Suite CS3. The preview release is available here.

Not to be left out…

Meanwhile, Adobe gave the National Association of Broadcasters a sneak peek at their plans for cross-platform authoring and streaming products. Including Adobe Media Player designed to show Flash movies in full-screen as high-quality, along with viewer ratings, on-demand streaming, progressive downloads and protected download and play - or DRM in other words. Adobe see the “download and carry” ability as important for advertisers and media companies because they will have a way to share media and make money at the same time. Adobe’s Media Player will be in direct competition with QuickTime, RealPlayer and Windows Media Player

In the past I was never really a fan of Flash. Its plug-ins were often buggy and continually upgraded. The processing power needed was more than some of my elderly computers liked and Flashed websites can be awkward and difficult to use. Take Habitat’s web site here as a good example of bad Flash. But recently Flash has grown up and even sites such as YouTube deliver content by Flash.

Winner takes all or nothing

This isn’t a matter of who will win, Flash or Silverlight, the problem is that neither Microsoft or Adobe have shown commitment to maintaining cross-platform parity of features. Microsoft’s track record is littered with abandoned projects: Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and VisualBasic, for example. There is still no decent Mac Outlook Client and even Office, much touted as the best of breed, is a pile of half-baked tools that can absorb huge chunks of time fruitlessly trying to achieve simple tasks. And that’s on both platforms.

Adobe also have a certain history in this department, Acrobat for the Mac hasn’t been feature-matching the Windows version for some years.

On balance I’d take Adobe over the convicted monopolist, Microsoft, any day of the week. They at least don’t try to “borrow” others work like Microsoft did for their VC-1 codec only to be found out when they submitted it as a standard. Then it was discovered that 16 different companies all had a part in VC-1, with 125 separate patents and only two belonging to Microsoft.