I have watched the emergence of Microsoft Silverlight with mixed feelings. On one hand, I am not a Microsoft fan, so I typically like to see other companies succeed in markets where Microsoft is a player. Therefore, I like the fact that Flash is the dominant player in the RIA market that Microsoft is attempting to enter. On the other hand, I like competition, and since Adobe enjoys a virtual monopoly with Flash, I’m kind of glad to see Microsoft throwing their weight behind a potential competitor to Flash. Up to today, though, I have always been a bystander in this game as I have never done anything with Silverlight, not even install the plugin.So today I’m on cubs.com watching their realtime “gameday”, which is a Flash based application that shows you the game in real time (not video, just stats, balls, strikes, plays, etc.). I noticed that they had a Play button next to some of the game’s plays which looked like I could watch a video highlight of that particlular play. When I clicked on it, I was asked to install Silverlight. At first I didn’t want to bother, but I was very curious if mlb.com had really added instant play highlights, so I gave in and installed Silverlight. After restarting Firefox, I went back to cubs.com and tried to play one of the game highlights. I was presented with the same “Please install Silverlight” screen. So I checked my plugins by typing about:plugins into the address bar, and found this:
So, as you can see, I do have the plugin installed, but it is not recognized by cubs.com. I’m not sure if this is Microsoft’s fault, or the web developers behind mlb.com’s gameday application, but either way I am not impressed so far with Silverlight.
