Microsoft Silverlight: They're not F$^*ing Around

So now we know what the smart boys at Microsoft have been doing over the holidays. Silverlight got a lot shinier today with support for what amounts to an entire .NET runtime in a browser, complete with JIT compiler, meaningful subclasses of the framework, Mac/Windows/IE/Firefox/cats-and-dogs-living-together support (sorry, Linux, you're a penguin), HTML/XAML/DOM shininess and a small (5MB) download. What in the world does it all mean?

• Fire Up the Long-Range Artillery! I guess with all the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads and the hyped-up competition of Vista vs. OS X, it almost seemed like Microsoft was a hardware company, allergic to the notion of Apple software. But if Microsoft is happy to sell Office to Mac users, why not .NET-based products? To be sure, you don't see Microsoft encouraging server-side use of .NET on non-Windows platforms, but this willingness to play nice with other OSes and browsers is interesting. The death of the OS has been prematurely announced too many times, but it makes an interesting thought experiment doesn't it? If the OS is dead, and all that matters is the browser, OS X is just as dead as Windows. Time to move the fight to the browser. Apple doesn't have much of a dog in that fight. It's Microsoft vs Adobe and this is opening salvo number two. (Number one, the offshore bombardments, was XPS.)
• It's the Ultimate Intranet Move. Putting Silverlight on every PC in a large corporation is a no-brainer, and it means all those enterprise software companies that truly hold up Microsoft's bottom-line are going to go ga-ga over this thing. Without enterprise software, just who is buying those profitable SQL Server and Windows Server licenses?
• Mono's World Just Got More Interesting. The guys at Mono have been keeping up with .NET fairly well to this point. But they recently declared they couldn't win the UI war. Now Mono is doing just fine in several niches, but Silverlight ups the ante by confirming that XAML is the future of .NET, and Mono needs to decide whether to follow or remain content to yet another scripting language for the Balkanized framework of Linux UI platforms.
• Time for another Mac. I suspect a lot of developers will be buying Macs this fall.