The ripple effects of Silverlight.

I have been away from Australia for about a a year now, and I came home the other night and noticed the intersection outside my old house has changed significantly. I thought wow, progress is a beast that never rests. Taped to one of the stop light poles was some flowers with a photo of a young 20 something male – a death had occurred here my family tells me later.

It struck me as odd, as here an intersection was left unchanged for 20 years, and the moment it changed, a death occurred. Was it worth it in the end? as the intention here was to prevent a tragedy but in the end it contributed to one (sure the kid may have been doing the wrong thing or might not have i don’t know).

The point here is one change creates ripples and those ripples can create more ripples and so on.

I meet with a friend who’s working in a research team for Skin Cancer here in Australia. He’s used Silverlight to provide data visualization around some of the research the doctors in his team are working on. It struck me that this Silverlight solution could unlock a small part of the cure or just as good, the prevention to skin cancer? or it could not I'll never really know.

I also meet with a customer who is using Silverlight to help incident reports in a mining company have a reduced turn around for compensation and medical payments to the said victims family. Silverlight here could help enable an employee to have his/her medical bills paid faster or compensation payment to the family return a fast result.

I think its important to put aside the Flash vs Silverlight politics here and simply state this. This product and many products we build in software today have huge impacts on society, and Silverlight for me is being a strong part of that. The latest version of Silverlight has new features that all of the above folks have been waiting to use to unlock the next level of growth their current solution requires and that for me is all the thanks I think our teams need for now.

I don’t care what critics in general say about Silverlight as if all we ever end up doing is the above type of solutions then i am definitely at peace with my contribution to this product and the world wide impacts it has.

Critics always want you to change, fans never want you to change but the ones in the middle push you into areas where change is natural.

Have fun with Silverlight!