Not to beat a dead horse, but what’s up with Microsoft announcing a Flash competitor?

It is with tremendous pleasure that I can reveal Microsoft Silverlight: our next-generation, cross-platform, cross-browser web client runtime. Silverlight (previously codenamed “WPF/E”) is a lightweight subset of XAML for building rich media experiences on the web.

My first thought is, cool, cause the bulk of my Flash knowledge is based around ActionScript. And ActionScript is teh suck. But the more I think about it, this just kind of illustrates my previous post about how Microsoft is becoming irrelevant.

Competition for “rich media experiences” on the web is good, I guess. But something like 98% of people on the web already have Flash installed. That’s going to be very hard to overcome. Even if Microsoft gets to, say 50%, it still makes Silverlight a losing game for the web (as a whole).

I’d bet good money no one will ever create a YouTube with Silverlight.