Dare Obasanjo, of Microsoft, is an obvious fan of Silverlight, and has a piece on how Ajax is now an Endangered Species. Now, there is some compelling work in Silverlight, but come on ;) Flash has been around for a long time, yet Ajax became en vogue a couple of years ago. It wasn’t because it could pull off richer effects than Flash. In many ways Flash is superior (storage, access to webcam, graphics, browser quirk issues), but it didn’t have some of the webby features that we love. It is a plugin. Silverlight is a plugin. Silverlight doesn’t have the install base of Flash. It doesn’t run on Linux, and I don’t expect everyone to drop arms to take it up after MIX. Ed Burnette has dissected Silverlight, and he discusses the very different 1.0 versus the 1.1 future. Sam Ruby has discussed his experience trying to get samples working. What do you think about the new Flash / Silverlight / Open Web world?