Everybody knows that Microsoft has the most successful operating system in the world and it’s partly due to the fact that some of the best software in the world was developed exclusively for Windows. Microsoft had invested heavily in software development and it’s development tools makes up around 18% of it’s operating income. In 2007 Microsoft released Silverlight. Silverlight allows you to carry over your existing .NET skills and create content that can be viewed in a browser. This is very beneficial because Silverlight is available for Windows, Mac OSX and unofficially for Linux via Moonlight. Why is this so good? A prime example of this is Microsoft’s amazing Worldwide telescope. The application was initially released as a local application powered by the Windows Presentation Foundation and recently a browser version was made that was powered by Silverlight. Now developers could do this with their applications and they would be available for the big three operating systems giving them access to 99.9% of the computer market. What’s also very interesting is that Expression Design, Expression Blend and Expression Encoder were all made using WPF. Now these are major applications so the fact that they could be transferred to a browser opens up a whole world of possibilities and shows that Microsoft is making the very important transition to cloud-based computing. But if you think of this from a companies perspective like Adobe who make products for both Windows and Mac it would allow them to just have one development team instead of two. Just one that knows how to develop software using Microsoft technologies. This would make Microsoft’s languages and development tools at the forefront of software development. Not to mention the fact that essentially you do need Windows and Microsoft software to develop Silverlight, so regardless if all of the users for a piece of Silverlight software used Macs Microsoft would still be involved, allowing them to generate revenue.