Yesterday I watched the rather long keynote from Microsoft’s Mix08 from the comfort of my office, trying to scope out what where Microsoft is going and what Silverlight 2.0 will really mean to both microISVs. Bottom line: a hell of a lot.

Hang in there with me as I work through all the stuff Ray Ozzie, Scott Gurthrie, et. al. covered and why it really does matter to you. Today I want to cover the broad-big stuff, tomorrow focus on specifics for microISVs.

Ray Ozzie & Microsoft

Three things were notable about what Ray Ozzie said - and he is the guy setting Microsoft’s strategic technical direction now - not Bill Gates and not Steve Ballmer. First, Microsoft intends to become as web centric a company as say Google.

Ever since 1995 when Bill noticed the Net in his famous memo, Microsoft has been at war with itself. On one side, the desktop people in the Windows and Office division - on the other, the growing number of people within MSFT who increasingly recognized that the Internet is profoundly remaking each and every aspect of everyone’s life on this planet and even mighty Microsoft cannot prevent this change.

That war is over and Microsoft’s core belief - the primacy of the desktop - is over as well.

Second thing to note: Microsoft is never going to embrace Open Source/Open Standards the way say Sun has, but it is now irrevocably committed to going down that same road. IE8 will be the proof of that.

Concurrent with the Mix08 keynote, Microsoft released today the first public beta of IE8. During the keynote, Dean Hachamovitch, IE’s General Manager threw in the towel - by the time IE8 is released to the public later this year its default rendering mode will be exactly what you see in FireFox or Safari, and web designers can stop spending 20% of their time trying to create never ending CSS hacks to beat IE into submission.

Now web designers have heard this from Microsoft in the past: IE 7 was supposed to comply with W3C’s standards. But there’s a vast difference between almost compliant and absolutely, positively compliant - and Microsoft is making achieving CSS 2.1 certified compliance its number one goal for IE8, releasing (as Open Source/Creative Commons licensed no less) 702 tests to the W3C working group that is going to define what CSS 2.1 is and is not.

The message was as clear as could be: IE8 will render exactly how other web standard compliant browsers do as its default from now. No excuses, no tricks, no “oops, we read that standard a little differently”, no more trying to ram IE down the world’s throat. Microsoft cannot afford to be non compliant as a business tactic, and the people running the show their no longer think that way. Whether it’s the right and power of the Open Source/Standards worldview, or the $2.5 billion the EU hit Microsoft with and shows every indication of being able to hit them again and again and again: it’s just too costly for Microsoft to buck the tide.

Third, Microsoft realizes there’s a $200 billion industry with a life-threatening condition, and Microsoft has the cure. The industry is advertising - specifically television advertising, and the cure is Silverlight and the computing power that the .NET Framework that Silverlight 2.0 is going to start to tap.

In the short term you can expect to start seeing more and more monetized video from a Web 2.0 site near you as Silverlight continues to spread - 1.5 million people a day are downloading it for their Vista and Win XP boxes and Macs and Linux PCs, according to Scott Gurthrie, Microsoft’s VP for the Developer Division and main M.C. for that 2 hour plus keynote.

And remember banner ads? Creating Silverlight banner ads that pop out, instantly play multiple videos and track how long you watch and what parts of the ad you click on and stream that data back to companies like DoubleClick are now a simple template for .NET developers and designers not much more complicated than the ubiquitous Word memo template.

Longer term, advertisers watching dropping television viewer numbers and the steady climb of those of us who fast forward past each and every commercial desperately need some way to better engage and immerse web-centric people or else their game is up. They desperately need some other way to get us to watch those ads. What better way than redefine television’s greatest sporting event, the Olympics? Perkins Miller, Senior VP at NBC Sports took the Mix08 stage to describe how a Silverlight-powered Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics is going to be utterly unlike what’s come before.

While NBC will be showing 1,200 hours of video across its five television networks, it’s going to be both broadcasting and doing video on demand of 2,400 hours of 35 sports - basically everything that happens at the Olympics - using Silverlight. Web workers will be going from the last Summer Olympics scratchy 320 x 200 “highlights” feed to full screen high quality controllable (pause, replay) video wrapped in a shell with expert commentary, online community comments from the instantly formed online community and of course advertising. Know your wife likes watching the 400 meter IM? Pop open a window, email here a link and she can catch it online while you watch picture in picture another event.

If you think online communities are hot now, watch what happens when instant online communities around shows, events, sports catch on!

Microsoft hopes Silverlight can create not just engaging and immersive entertainment communities on your computer’s screen (Win, Mac or Linux), but on your cell phone as well. Nokia announced yesterday that its high end phone will soon get Silverlight.

One Vegas-centric Silverlight cell phone app demoed during the keynote - Mixer - let you find which friends were in which bars - complete with database, Twitter and Flickr feeds and hot or not on the fly venue rating. This was one powerful app - think of it as your mission critical after hours executive dashboard - amply demonstrated what could happen if Silverlight makes real apps, not just games and bitsize utilities a reality for connected web workers. This was one smart app - screw up too many times clicking the buttons on your Nokia Windows Mobile 6-enabled phone and it pops up a sobriety test. Safe computing indeed!

This post is getting rather long, so tomorrow I plan to lay out Part 2: Why Silverlight matters to Windows Desktop microISVs.

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