1. Adoption of the plugin. Currently, one can think of using Flash to make RIA which could be used by most of the people around the world. This is one serious limitation.

2. Yes, your .NET Framework knowledge helps but if you don’t know WPF, good luck using your ASP.NET knowledge to create Silverlight application. May be I have not spent enough time learning WPF. May be it is because there are still not enough good resources to learn/master WPF. Also, WPF hasn’t really made inroads in corporate world which gives you the opportunity to work with the technology.

3. Lack of components. Until Beta 2, Silverlight did not have a grid component! Because technology is relatively new, you don’t have myriad of components, so you spend time writing those basic components in fact of solving the business problem. I am sure as time goes on, situation will improve.

Even though I think Silverlight is a fantastic platform, adoption by geeks is relative low for MS developers and almost zero for non MS developers [which is understandable knowing that Micro$oft sucks! ] Let’s see how Microsoft plans to improve the adoption.

I have to disagree with your opinion on Silverlight as I think it has some amazing advantages:

1. Its code gets compiled and interpreted like .NET code on the client. Thats 20x faster than JS
2. Compiled code, unlike script, means you get compile time errors, you can do unit testing
3. It requires the same skillset a .NET developers would already have developing ASP.NET or Windows applications – easy migration

Plus they put a lot into videos and design time etc. so I see a lot of promise in that technology…
Now they have to start selling it to dev teams

Regards,
Eran

Being a web developer, this post makes MUCH more sense in convincing me that Google Chrome can’t really kill Windows, at least not in near future.

And you are spot on about W3C comment. If we look at history, Ajax was originally ‘invented’ by Microsoft by introducing XMLHttp Active X Object. It slowly became popular and other browsers started supporting it. Google made the technology mainstream by creating Google Maps and Adaptive Path gave it a catchy name, ‘Ajax’. W3C came in way too late by documenting this ‘standard’ which everyone was already following.

I am still not sure what is the right answer. Having looked at Flex/Silverlight, I must say that I am not that impressed. Not because they don’t have potential, but the technology is still in its infancy and it shows. And I want to get my work done, RIGHT NOW. Let’s see what the future holds.