The recent article in Macworld (Analysis: For Microsoft shops, Silverlight 2.0 trumps Flash) has generated quite a bit of interest over the past week in the Microsoft community. If the comments at macworld.com are any indication, the article was not well-received by the Apple community.
The salient question, for me, is 'Which is better?' The answer is, it depends.
'Depends on what?' you ask. It depends on a single question, and that is 'what type of solution are you after? A solution that emphasizes experience or a solution that emphasizes function.'
When I say this, I understand the relationship between experience and function -> that is, if there's poor experience it will likely lead to poor function and vs versa.
But to really understand why this line of distinction is important, you have to look beyond the direct comparison between Silverlight and Flash. Here are the 5 important dimensions:
When you look at it across these dimensions, Microsoft has the edge in terms of function. They have a very deep base for building functional solutions - it goes way beyond what's currently available in Silverlight. Everything around Microsoft (history, platform, tools and community) is built around function. And, everything around Adobe is built around experience. It's so important to consider the role of the community here - Silverlight isn't necessarily better at functional solutions; but there's a huge base of experience (both at Microsoft and at the 600,000 or so Microsoft partners around the world) in building functional apps. And, a similar story on the Adobe side with respect to experience-based solutions.
It's also interesting to note that Microsoft is edging closer towards experience (Silverlight and the Expression suite are evidence of this) and Adobe is edging closer to function (AIR, Flex are evidence of this). This will be great for the industry.
A lot has happened over the past couple of weeks in the ongoing fight between Microsoft's Silverlight