Talking with Tim O'Brien on Microsoft's Platform

By David Worthington

February 2, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
On Feb. 1, Windows Azure transitioned from a beta into a commercial product, radically altering how Microsoft developers create and deploy software. With that change as the backdrop, SD Times interviewed Tim O'Brien, director of Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, to discuss its vision of the future. That conversation was focused on the cloud, Silverlight and developing with .NET.

SD Times: What is the strategy for Silverlight?

Tim O'Brien: Our strategy of record is to enable developers to take apps across multiple devices. Some big changes we’ve seen is that customers use lots of devices.

The PC will always be there, but we're focused on how to take that experience and make it consistent across devices in a way that optimizes and exploits the device. We cannot entirely replicate the PC experience on a device with a smaller screen and fewer inputs.
When we took the Outlook franchise and said, "Deliver it through the browser to the occasional user," it informed our developer strategy in a lot of ways.

People are using form factors based on the context of what they are in. Silverlight pinned to dock in OS X gives you a window in how we are thinking of Silverlight as a runtime.
We think there will be big opportunity around what you do with data: visualizing it, aggregating it, slicing and dicing it. There is cheap storage like blob storage data.

Aggregation and presentation of data opens interesting opportunities. Just look at what we did with NASA's Mars data.

Silverlight is more optimized for Windows than on Macs, and Mono Moonlight development trails behind Silverlight on Windows. There are a lot of devices that don't run Windows. What about those devices?

We've done Silverlight with Symbian and Nokia. We are open to discussing partnerships where it makes sense. Runtimes with critical mass in the marketplace become interesting, even if they are non-Microsoft.

Microsoft is adding more and more capabilities on top of .NET and Silverlight. How will developers keep up?

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