Silverlight aficionados will tell you that comparing Silverlight and Flash makes as much sense as a comparison between a Moto Razr and the iPhone. They will tell you that Silverlight was created for a far bigger purpose;  to light up the web (to use Microsoft’s marketing lingo) in the same way as Windows Presentation Foundation (formerly Avalon – I just love Microsoft’s system of nomenclature. Which genius thought of Vista though?) was to light up the Windows Platform. Maybe they are right – Silverlight might have a more audacious goal (which Microsoft product doesn’t?), but with Microsoft trying to eat up some of the ubiquitous Flash market a comparison is valid.

Before we begin to start comparing them as media clients, let us examine them as application platforms from the perspective of the one trying to play ketchup, i.e. Silverlight:

Security

Silverlight stepped out of the browser with Silverlight 3 and brought with it the same sandbox environment as it had within the broswer. Unlike Adobe Air applications (Flash’s flavor for desktop applications), Silverlight apps do not require elevated privileges to run, which makes for a more secure environment. But then, with elevated privileges Air apps can do so much more.

Offline Browser Support

Speaking of more, Adobe Air has better offline browser support with an included webkit; whereas, with Silverlight if the app requires HTML or a script running within the browser, then too bad – you can’t do it. Air also has local database support with embedded SQLite, Silverlight does not.

Remote Data Access

Silverlight 3 does address remote data access shortcomings; Ajax apps (and Silverlight apps) will be able to to retrieve remote-data which will come down in the default JSON format.

SEO Friendly

Silverlight 3 is also looking to be more SEO friendly by permitting deep linking URLs to point to places within the application.  To make things even more exciting for search engine crawlers, an ASP add on mirrors dynamic content into HTML for easy indexing.

3 D

Things become easier in the 3rd dimension with Silverlight, where you can apply a 3 D effect to any media object with a 3 D API.

Oh and here’s the closer: multi-touch support is available with Silverlight 3… but only on Windows 7 (did I mention this was a Microsoft product?!)

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To summarize: Microsoft seems to have done a great job with Silverlight 3 and promises much more with Silverlight 4. But how can it convince developers to ignore the ubiquity of Flash (installed on 95% of web browsers) remains the big challenge for Microsoft.

Just found this brilliant image at OneComics.

I’m not sure that Federico Fieni realizes how beautifully he’s merged art with technology. And art is always open to interpretation, so my interpretation is:

• Chrome is the new Windows.
• Instead of a PC equipped with an OS + Application stack, you now have a browser equipped with an Internet connection + web services stack.
• The choice of colors (and even the hue of each color) was oh-so-intentional. And I bet that some folks over at Microsoft aren’t best pleased with this insinuation.

But most importantly, this sounds like Google has officially started the war of the worlds. And since all is fair in love and war, will we excuse Google’s occasional deviances from “do no evil”?

Can Google even win this war? To be fair to Microsoft, I loved Ballmer’s recent memo that talked about “Software plus Services”- it makes an incredible amount of sense, and Microsoft is definitely very well positioned to push hard at it.

The way I see it, Google’s plan of baiting Microsoft into the online ads market has failed(through chance, or circumstance), and now Microsoft has $40b extra (maybe less, given where we are today) to invest in this new breed of computing that combines hardware, software, services and cloud infrastructure.

So Google will have to build a really compelling case to convince us that they can take away the Hardware, and the Software, and YET…build us a dream based on services and the cloud. And as much as I like Google, I think they’ve already lost the battle. Some veteran strategists at Microsoft have just pulled a very fast one on them.

Microsoft, Rebooted and stronger. Google, Chromed and prettier.

Hm. I’ve already made my choice. This is no time for pretty.

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Update: Steve Gilmor just wrote a very interesting perspective on this over at TechCrunch.