The king is dead, long live the king

I think it was september 2004 when I had the chance to meet Eric Rudder from Microsoft, Senior Vice President for Server and Tools. He was on a trip in Romania and met some of the Microsofties down here. We could ask questions about future, he spoke us some things about his life. In three words: strong and great personality.
Back then I was finishing a project which involved a rudimentary form of Ajax, in house developed and I was very very bored with the mess of Javascript and DIV's and IE memory problems which affected my application's quality and performance.

I don't remember the first two "proposed directions" I told him, but the third was: I want to be able to run .NET code in the browser. Some people laughed at the proposal, which kind of made me feel somehow unconfortable. Eric pointed out that he knows we already can write .NET in the browser. I wasn't new in the technology so I knew it wasn't true.
We cannot say the actual .NET is a proper solution to run applications in browser. Maybe I was misunderstood, but now we have Scott Guthrie underlning that MS has brought .NET in to the browser through silverlight (March 2008, minute 1:58 please). The technology is not new, and I do not compare it to Flash or other RIA options available right now. The technology has it's roots in X11, where you could run process on one server and display them on any X11 capable device, just more decoupled.

I belive silverlight is the king. If Microsoft will properly suport this platform, this has the chance to become the new base for interacting with the "cloud" as they mention it.
From my humble point of view, MS is on the right track: comunity, comunity, comunity. Continous feedback, open source and continous inovation.

Some sample about XWindows resources here.