It’s taken just two weeks since the announcement of Microsoft’s Silverlight thingamy for a ferocious backlash and division to occur between developers. Silverlight joins the list of cross-browser, cross-platform plugins intended to deliver desktop-like behaviour and performance in a web browser or as a standalone package. For Silverlight this means leveraging .NET. One of the more interesting announcements at MIX07 was that Silverlight has a mini-Common Language Runtime which allows developers to code in a variety of languages, including Ruby.

This all sounds like a great idea. And it probably is, but for one reason: Microsoft.

Frankly, I’ve had enough of Microsoft, and I’ve had enough of this ‘me too’ approach to innovation. There is nothing on Earth that’s been developed by Microsoft that in any shape or form has enhanced my life, or my friends, colleagues and customers. Instead, I’ve been through technological hell coping with and working around the inadequacies of their software. And, yes, I am still astonished and shocked that people still buy their products.

Silverlight might turn out great. But I couldn’t care. I won’t develop with it, or for it. We’ve the start of a long tail here which finishes with Microsoft’s stock value. How long will it be before the CLR version of Ruby starts sprouting proprietary constructs and the standard library becomes non-standard? Do I want to put my career in someone else’s hands? No.

The purpose of Silverlight is to stop developers jumping ship to other platforms and to other vendors. Ever wondered why Steve Balmer is so keen on developers? Because without developers, Microsoft is nothing. The same, incidentally, is true for Apple, Adobe and every other company that’s recently woken up to the power of the web. It’s the future – the desktop is dead.

I wrote before that Adobe’s Flash is overused – sometimes it’s the wrong technology for the job, and other times it’s the technology that drives the solution (not the problem). There is no doubt that many applications will be written with Silverlight, Flex, Apollo etc., because the technology exists and not because the problem can only be effectively solved with these products. For an illustration of the right way to develop, take a look at Ambassador Publications. They just launched an internet advertising platform built with Dojo, and because of its open-source, community based nature, Dojo is better as a result.

These two tenets of development ensure that products develop and evolve as needed and not when shareholders need a dividend fix or companies need to play catch-up. The bottom line is I trust community before corporation – and that’s why I’ll ignore Silverlight.