silverlight2 Now more than ever, experiences are about much more than “look and feel”. Great experiences are those that look great and work flawlessly. They entertain and engage, with rich, contextual and relevant content. They are easy to use. And they ensure reliability, performance and security, under real-world pressures of scale and complexity.
The best experiences are deeply connected to the companies and brands they represent – they’re not just billboards, they’re windows and doors through which customers should be able to see and interact with your business and your brand in a substantial way.

Most of the tools we use date from a time when the Web was about “content,” but today’s experiences need the power of software: not only to deliver the richness and interactivity users want, but also to connect those experiences to the business systems that matter, to deliver those experiences reliably at a massive scale, and to do it all with an eye towards the bottom line: cost and time to market.

For example, consider a typical product configurator, which lets users really get to know the product, play around with it and customize it to their needs. The second the customer hits the “buy” button, that great experience needs to start talking to the inventory and billing systems that will process their payment and ship their product, and the CRM system that connects this product with anything else they’ve bought.

The fact is, once your great experience starts to deliver results – whether that’s user engagement that needs to be tracked, analyzed and monetized, or purchases that need to be processed – you are now in the software business.
Silverlight gives you what you need to light up the Web.

  • You can deliver compelling, exciting, discoverable experiences, with all the features and capabilities you expect, like vector graphics, animation, styling and skinning, and some new things that weren’t possible before.
  • You can keep users on your site longer and make the most of your content through flawless media experiences that include high-definition video and smooth on-demand streaming.
  • You can build user “buzz” and differentiate yourself with innovative technologies that push the boundaries of interactivity and give you new ways to explore your brand.
  • You can easily connect your application to your back-end using web services; or make use of more advanced technologies such as ADO.Net to directly query and page data from your server; or use Isolated Storage to work with data locally.

Although you don’t need anything more than a text editor and a Web server to create and deliver Silverlight experiences, you can deliver compelling, powerful and accelerated experiences by tapping into Microsoft’s complete solution – you can create more efficiently with Expression and Visual Studio, you can extend your experiences to wherever your customers are with technologies like the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and you can serve them reliably and cost-effectively with the Windows Server System. You can pick as much or as little as you need to get the job done. And whether you’re a two-person shop or a Fortune 500 corporation, there’s a solution that’s right for you.

Silverlight Positioning & Messaging

A core part of my job is to speak to customers about the strategy and value proposition of our technologies. In my research, I came across a pretty comprehensive internal document created by our Silverlight marketing team. This document is organized as a reference for those considering using Silverlight in one of the 4 key scenarios : media & advertising, business applications, developers and designers. For each scenario the document looks at which aspects of Silverlight are beneficial in 3 dimensions:

  • Compelling Experiences. How Silverlight delivers the highest quality, engaging experiences
  • Powerful Technology. Aspects of the platform and ecosystem that makes choosing Silverlight much more than just a technology choice.
  • Accelerated Results. How Silverlight gets the results that you want, faster.

This document will probably eventually find its way onto the relevant communication channels, but I thought I would share the content via a series of blog posts - for those of you who break out in a rash when you hear marketing speak, beware!